How Rotary Brush Machines Improve Edge Quality

January 17, 2023

Jarid Hockert

When fabricating metal or wood products for highly demanding industries, like health care and food processing, there are certain expectations for your edge finishing, such as reliable quality, burr-free surfaces and smoother textures. Yet, traditional industrial sanding machines and manual processes take more time and may produce less than desirable results.

Timesavers developed innovative rotary brush sanders to meet the challenge, resulting in faster, safer and more consistent edge finishing.

Boost Safety and Save Time With Rotary Brush Sanders

Rotary brush sanding replaces manual sanding — a time-consuming process that significantly impacts throughput — to ensure smoother, safer surfaces. Manual approaches often create inefficient workflows, causing production bottlenecks and consuming numerous labor hours.

Trying to rush the manual process isn’t practical, either, as it often results in inconsistencies and parts that don’t meet industry regulations and standards. Plus, manual sanding can still leave sharp edges, posing safety hazards to your workforce and consumers.

Timesavers’ rotary brush sanders eliminate these challenges. We’ve brought years of research and experience to develop a machine that provides several benefits, including:

  • Increased performance
  • Greater throughput
  • Enhanced safety

With our automated technology, smoothing and deburring become a one-step process and deliver significant time and money savings for your facility.

Our rotary brush machine design relies on a barrel-shaped wheel featuring many smaller abrasive flaps rather than a single large one. These rotary brushes easily mount to carousel assemblies, allowing parts to pass beneath them on a conveyor belt. As parts feed through, the brushes hit them with abrasion on all edge surfaces for smooth and consistent results. Thanks to our innovative engineering, our rotary brush sanders can even produce outstanding one-step edge finishing for irregularly shaped parts.

More Advantages of Our Rotary Brush Sanding Machines

One of the most valuable features of our rotary brush sanding machines is their versatility — you can fully tailor the solutions for your specific production requirements. Adjust the feed and brush speeds, or change the grit level of the abrasive flaps to meet your application needs. Plus, multidirectional capabilities allow for various finishing touches to add character, such as random scratches. Thanks to this flexibility, you can produce a range of custom parts and decorative edge finishes.

Our sanding machines have impressively long life spans, which means even more return for your original investment. Our technicians are still repairing equipment manufactured in the 1960s and ‘70s, proving our sanders’ longevity. We also help you save time and money on machine maintenance. Our skilled technician team has access to over $6 million in parts inventory, making for faster repairs and more uptime.

Additionally, we provide a full range of support services, from technical troubleshooting to installation and machine training. Our equipment experts can resolve issues with a free phone call 95% of the time, ensuring you get back to production sooner.

Inside Our Rotary Brush Performance

We did not simply stumble upon our innovative rotary brush design. We went through many rounds of trial and error facilitated by years of research to create our current rotary brush design. It was through partnerships with both abrasive suppliers and our sister company in Holland that we were able to come to some surprising conclusions.

First, a barrel-shaped wheel (as opposed to the traditional sanding belt) performs exceptionally well when trying to eliminate sharp edges and burrs. But we learned that solid brushes on the same design leave something to be desired. It was this realization that led our engineers to craft a rotary brush that was comprised of thousands of abrasive flaps, as opposed to one solid mass.

Our next innovation came through observing that when we mounted a few pairs of our new abrasive flap brushes to a carousel assembly over a moving conveyor belt, we were able to feed parts beneath our new brushes, where they would then be hit with abrasion on all sides.

While this method may sound aggressive, the effect is almost disarming in its gentle nature. Plated or film-coated parts can be fed through our rotary brush machines to achieve a smooth and consistent edge break all-around without any damage. There’s no need to sacrifice any measure of handling to achieve the edge quality your products require.

How Our Rotary Brush Machines Can Work For You

The beauty of a Timesavers rotary brush machine lies in its ability to adapt to your needs. With our rotary brush machines, you have the ability to adjust not only the abrasive grit of the brush’s flaps, but the brush interference, feed speed, and speed of the brushes themselves. Between these many variables, vast levels of edge rounding can be achieved. But beyond edge finishing, our rotary brush machines can produce unique industrial finishing multidirectional touches, like random scratches and other tasteful adornments.

While the absence of burrs and sharp edges is one of the most attractive results of our rotary brush machine, its longevity and ability to save you time contribute to its appeal for most manufacturers. Many of our customers have been astounded by their Timesavers rotary brush machines. Customers face difficult tasks as their products are often built from irregularly shaped stainless steel parts that are full of internal slots, holes, and edge profiles. Companies were spending hundreds of hours manually deburring, but once a Timesavers rotary brush machine is introduced, their deburring department has the ability to go to just one person running their machine, and their new Timesavers machine now produces a “consistent edge quality, every single time.”

Learn More About Rotary Brush Machines

Industrial finishing doesn’t need to be a tedious and time-consuming task. With the use of a Timesavers rotary brush machine, you can cut down on production time, eradicate burrs, and consistently achieve perfect edges. If you would like to learn more about our rotary brush machines, or any of our other unrivaled metalworking equipment, feel free to reach out to us today. We look forward to working with you to find the perfect edge quality solution that best suits your production needs and goals.