Not long before FABTECH 2025 opened, Flow’s Senior Director of Marketing, Katie Parlin, wrote a couple of LinkedIn posts that stated her excited/nervous state over the upcoming show. She had changed the colors and branding of Flow, and she said she had “sweaty palms” over potential typos, etc., the details that could derail her efforts.
She needn’t have worried, but her concern over those issues is probably why it turned out so well. In fact, the Flow booth was swamped for most of the show, in part because the company added significantly to its product line.
For years, if I stood in front of a FABTECH crowd and said, “I say Flow, you say _____,” half of the people would have shouted “Waterjet!” and half the people would have just thought it. But the status quo changed, and Flow showed its additions to its line: The first of its LZR fiber laser machines, and the first of its press brake series, the HyperBend.
Let’s have a look at the laser. The following video shows a glance at the control (which is showing the nest), and then gets into watching the smooth operation of the laser head, which has lots of different cuts, including the on/off square cuts that save so much time. Here it is in action:
The state of the laser art has advanced to such a state that Flow could get into that market mid-stream and not be far behind any other makers, except for the extensive automation and IIoT software underpinnings that the big boys have. But as a laser cutter, it stacks up well in the market. In case you’re curious, it comes in 3015 and 4020 models, both of which offer lasers powered at 6 kW, 12 kW, and 20 kW. They feature dual-pallet load/unload, auto focus, automatic nozzle changer, and more.
As for the press brake, the 6-axis HyperBend is available in seven different tonnages, from 85 to 350 (US) tons. Bed sizes range from 8 ft. to 20 ft. Dynamic crowning is standard. The system is based on a hybrid drive technology, with an AC servo motor and a variable speed pump. Here is a look in what may be our briefest video ever, 22 seconds, and with two manual bends we have a useful product:
Back to Flow’s historical strength, there is a new waterjet called the NX Pro that keeps the abrasive wet at all times, and in fact recycles it and after filtering, reuses it. The entire waterjet is enclosed and is very quiet, as Flow demonstrated at the booth at FABTECH:
It’s a big departure from convention, and that’s what showgoers want to see.
From a city with more than 200,000 people in southern Poland named Częstochowa comes the Kimla laser, available in this country from Specialty Machinery Inc. It is a very fast-moving machine, as you’ll find out in a moment. The machines come in four power capacities, from 2 kW to 12 kW. Interestingly, all have a “Z” axis of 100 mm.
The video showing the Kimla laser is stitched together from two videos, one that shows its ultra-fast motion in repositioning, and one that shows its cutting speed. Both are impressive:
Olis Robotics, based in Seattle (only a half-hour drive from Flow’s Kent, WA headquarters), had a very interesting application set up at its FABTECH display space. A machine/work area, a robot, and an Android tablet on an easel. The robot was tending its work, the Android was watching the robot do its work, and the easel was in a fight against gravity to keep the Android at robot-viewing level.
It was a winning combination, despite a work stoppage. In fact the stoppage was part of the demo. The app on the Android was from Olis, and it was monitoring the action in pretty detailed fashion—so much so that it could recreate conditions that were in effect before the stoppage. (If it reminds you of a black box in aviation, you’ve got the right idea.)
The photo shows the basic setup. If the work stops, a tech can see the conditions at stoppage, and enough before that to dig into the root cause of the shutdown. Right now this solution is being sold to integrators, distributors, people who want their customers to have the most uptime possible, and have information about the situation when the uptime has run out.