An equipment manufacturer supplying to the mining sector needed a support bracket for a heavy-duty conveyor assembly. The original design was heavy, welded from plate, and labour-intensive to make. They wanted a lighter, more consistent part that could be produced in batches of 50 without quality variation between parts.
We reviewed the drawing and suggested redesigning the bracket as a laser-cut and CNC-bent part rather than a welded fabrication. Using folded sheet steel instead of welded plate cut the weight, improved consistency, and reduced fabrication time per part. We laser-cut the profiles, bent them on the press brake, welded the fixing tabs, and sent the batch for black powder coating. First-off sample was approved before we ran the full batch.
The redesigned bracket was 25% lighter than the original welded version, came in under budget, and was delivered in 10 working days. The manufacturer has reordered three more batches since, and the part is now standard on their equipment line.
The original bracket was a welded plate fabrication — three pieces of plate cut, welded and ground together. It worked, but it was heavy, expensive to make, and the weld quality varied between batches. We suggested redesigning it as a folded sheet metal part: one flat blank laser-cut, then bent on the press brake to form the bracket shape, with only two small welds for the fixing tabs.
The result was a part that was 25% lighter, dimensionally identical every time (because it's CNC bent, not hand-welded), and faster to produce. The client now uses this design as standard across their equipment line — a one-time design review that paid for itself on the very first batch.
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