Another thing to remember is that traditional methods of checking for twists and bows in the tube may take as long as five to seven seconds before cutting begins. You have to compromise accuracy for productivity with traditional touch sensing. This can be frustrating, especially in this age of fiber laser cutting. However, working with tube is much more difficult than working with sheet metal.
There are no standard material towers with a laser tube cutting machine. Bundle loaders, the most efficient of the tube material handling options, feed one tube at a time from the bundle into the tube laser via a singularizing system. This type of feeding mechanism doesn’t work with open profiles, such as angles or channels, because they interlock while in a bundle and don’t come free easily. For open profiles, step loaders are used, which sequence a section one at a time into the machine while keeping the correct orientation of that section.