AP&T UniLines – 60 years of sheet metal forming expertise in a new line concept
What do a kettle grill, a ball bearing, a refrigerator, and a bumper have in common? They are all made on a press line from AP&T. Now AP&T is launching UniLines, a new line concept that distills the company’s combined knowledge and experience in sheet metal forming since the 1960s and makes it available to manufacturers of all sizes.
For more than 60 years, AP&T has operated across a wide range of industries, from automotive and defense to home appliances, electronics, and energy. The company has now brought this depth of experience together in AP&T UniLines, where every component has been refined through thousands of deliveries and carries knowledge from all the niches where AP&T is active.
UniLines is built on standardized modules (presses, automation, tooling, control systems) that can be freely combined, like LEGO bricks, based on each manufacturer’s specific needs and conditions. The result is a tailored line built on-site that can be formed with a high degree of freedom: configured as a U, straight like a skewer, or whatever best fits the shop floor environment. Short or long, a large press or a small press, the manufacturer’s reality determines the layout, but the line always has the same core values: robust performance, easy operation, and long service life. For certain niches, AP&T also offers fully turnkey line concepts, with layout, technical data, simulations, and total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations ready to roll out.
As part of the new UniLines concept, AP&T has upgraded several included components with a new generation of automation and more precise, flexible Speedfeeders. Combined with a servo press, this delivers shorter cycle times, higher availability, and lower energy consumption, and overall UniLines provides noticeably higher output compared with previous generations of lines.
“Since the 1960s, we’ve worked with everything from heat shields and ventilation components to shell casings and body-in-white parts. That experience is now built into how we integrate them into a functioning line,” says Lennart Johansson, Business Manager Line Solutions at AP&T. “With UniLines, you could say we’ve made all our combined sheet metal forming knowledge available to every manufacturer, regardless of industry or size.”
Integration is one of the things that sets UniLines apart from other modular solutions. Just like the mechanical modules, the integration is based on decades of experience from different industries and applications, consolidated and refined in the new concept. AP&T’s integrators assemble the line’s logic: the sequence of events, how the automation behaves during a tooling change, what happens if a sensor returns an unexpected value, and how the operator is notified. This spans everything from sequencing and safety functions to the structure of the control system interface.
AP&T can also run the calculations in advance. By evaluating each configuration based on parameters such as cycle time, energy consumption, availability, changeover time, and the amount of floor space the line requires, AP&T can estimate both how the line will perform and the total cost of ownership (TCO) before the customer makes their decision.
UniLines also reflects AP&T’s philosophy of One Responsible Partner, where the entire chain, from press and automation, tooling and control systems, to installation and service, is handled by one and the same provider.
“As a manufacturer, you get a solution where all components are optimized to work together. That enables us to ensure high availability, low energy consumption, and easy operation over time,” says Lennart Johansson. “In short, you get a line that just keeps running and running and running.”