RMC Equipment has conquered the familiar problem of seized metal with an AES (Automotive Equipment Solutions) hi3.5 induction heater.
RMC Loosens up with AES Induction Heater
RMC specialises in hiring, servicing and repairing compact loaders, such as the Avant Tecno Compact Loaders. With most work taking place outdoors, this means that service and repair work frequently revolved around corroded metal, which used to be one of the company’s biggest hurdles for its machinery.
“A lot of the people who rent our equipment are in the equestrian world, and horse manure corrodes most of the metalwork around the hitch pins on the machines,” explains RMC proprietor, Peter Woolnough. “When it comes to getting pins and bushes out, it’s just not possible. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it with a sledgehammer, and we’ve tried pushing them out with hand-pump bottle jacks – all sorts of things – they’re just in there solid.”
Woolnough added, “We could take an oxyacetylene torch to it and heat it up, but that naturally damages paintwork and the actual structure of the metal, so it’s not the ideal way of doing it. It’s very much your last resort. Sometimes, we’d have to say to the customer, ‘until it wears out a bit more, we just can’t get it out’. We couldn’t change what we wanted to change because we just couldn’t budge it.”
Peter subsequently procured AES’s hi3.5 portable induction heater to tackle the problem head-on. The induction heater is designed specifically to loosen commonplace items, including rusted bolts, stuck joints, bearings and hubs. This is done by applying heat in a pinpointed and controlled fashion. It is much simpler, faster and safer than heating any material with an open flame with no specialist training required to operate the equipment.
“The induction doesn’t damage the paint or the metalwork on the machine. It also channels the heat so it’s exactly where we want it,” adds Peter, who has also employed the AES hi3.5 in other capacities. “We mainly use it for getting corroded things apart, but it is also helpful when you get different metals next to each other that stick together. It just breaks the tension that the metals build up independently, so we’ve been extremely impressed.”
“We use it if we just want to bend a piece of metal. To do so, you just heat the metal up along the line into which you’re going to insert into a vice and then bend it. That’s not its main use, but it does help to be able to put localised heat into something when we’re fabricating metal.”
The hi3.5 and other heat inductors supplied by AES, says the company, are the ideal alternative to naked flame heaters in all garages and workshops – from plant and miscellaneous equipment to LCV, HGV and auto applications.
