Wenger Corporation

Wenger Corporation specializes in a comprehensive range of products and solutions for musicians and musical environments, from specially designed chairs and choral risers to sound isolated practice rooms and recording/playback systems for practice/rehearsal purposes. Sales are mainly domestic and the company’s R&D department is constantly bringing new products and solutions to the market, always keeping Wenger well ahead of competitors. Wenger Corporation has about 400 employees and all products are manufactured in the company’s production facilities in Owatonna, Minnesota.

Wanted to increase quality and productivity
David Aarsvold, manufacturing engineer at Wenger, told us they had a Power folder that was 20 years old. This old machine had a time consuming and difficult line-by-line programming system, the machine itself had a lot of maintenance issues and the quality of produced parts didn’t meet with today’s standards.
When Wenger started looking for a new folder they wanted these issues to be solved. They also wanted easier programming, deeper box tooling, and to get into up/down-folding so as to increase productivity and achieve better operator safety.
At the Fabtech exhibition in Chicago, David and his colleagues met with Chandler and Doug from CIDAN. Together they decided that the CIDAN PRO Z 30 would be the perfect Up/down folder for Wenger. After giving it careful consideration, Wenger placed the order for the PRO Z 30.
The machine was delivered bang on time, CIDAN staff took care of the installation and stayed in place to train 4-5 operators.

How do you like the control system?
“-Programming in PROLINK Z was easy and the graphic interface was easy to understand and operate,” David says. “Today all operators do the programming themselves. We run very short series, 1-20 pcs, so of course there’s a lot of programming and retrieving programs.”
“-We make door frames that require high precision on the 90 degree bends. The PRO Z gives us far better quality than our old machine. We have also found a large benefit in using the combi beam to rotate between tools throughout making a part.”

Why not a press break?
“-A press break could be an alternative for some of the parts but with the changeover time to hem and the weight of the parts, it doesn’t make a good fit. If the shape is a box, radius (wing or bump bending) or has a hem it will likely be made on the folder. The two different machines really complement each other. Many of the items the PRO Z can make with one operator, would require two people to hold them using our press break.”
“-We’ve been running the machine for over two years now and are very pleased with it. It runs in two shifts and there are hardly any problems. We let the CIDAN staff carry out proactive maintenance every six months. We are really impressed by the capacities of the PRO Z.”