Gonvarri Galicia

The company was founded to create a service centre to supply the main clients in this area, Gestamp Vigo and Gestamp Portugal, which in turn are direct suppliers of the PSA group.

Operating since December 2004, the plant measures around 15,000 m2. It is divided into a production area measuring 6,500 m2 and a raw material and finished product warehouse measuring 8,200 m2. The plant is situated in the Marin port, enabling it to make good use of its excellent logistical location for both receiving raw materials (by sea or land) and shipping the finished product to the client by road (motorway).

The production area is made up of two slitting lines, two press lines and a cut-to-length line, as well as 4 bridge cranes. In Galicia, a robot has been incorporated for the first time in Spain for automatically changing the cutting tools used in the slitting lines, thus promoting ergonomics in the work place and improving productivity of the changes.

Gonvarri Galicia's activity involves cutting flat iron and steel products so that they can subsequently be stamped into car parts.
This cutting produces:

Strips
Coil slitting operation. Strips are obtained in the slitting lines. The mother coil is fed into the line, goes through a circular shear that has previously been adjusted to obtain the desired number of cuts and ends up in the strip coiler that collects the resulting strips.

Flans
Cut-to-length operations to transform the coils into rectangular, trapezium or parallelogram shapes. The mother coil is fed into the line and goes through a press that flattens the sheet metal before cutting. A transversal shear consisting of an upper and lower blade that acts like a guillotine then cuts the metal. These blades move on a head so that they can be positioned at a specified angle to produce rectangles as well as trapeziums and parallelograms. Upon leaving the shear, the sheets are transported by conveyor belt to the stacking unit, so that they can be packaged and shipped to the client.

Silhouettes
Irregular shape cutting operations. Presses are used to obtain silhouettes. As above, the raw material is fed into the line and the sheet metal is cut into the shape set by the cutting die. Upon leaving the press, the sheets are collected by a conveyor belt that takes them to the stacking unit.

In line with its client oriented approach, the Galicia plant has optimised its use of traditional packaging materials by eliminating wood used when shipping strips and substituting wood for returnable platforms when shipping flans.