January/February 1997
True to its name, Mayfran International scours the globe in search of the best and brightest in conveying and chip processing technology for both scrap generating and scrap processing applications.
By Rebecca Porter
Rebecca Porter is an associate editor of Scrap.
It’s appropriate that Mayfran International has the word “international” displayed prominently in its name.
With engineering and manufacturing facilities in the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan, not to mention sales offices and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, India, and Korea, Mayfran is arguably the world’s largest producer of conveying and processing systems for metal chips and coolant, counting 900 employees worldwide and annual sales of $120 million to $150 million, according to Dick Merrill, vice president of marketing and sales.
And one look around the company’s Cleveland headquarters—which encompasses 110,000 square feet of manufacturing space, 35,000 square feet of office space, and 275 employees—offers visible proof of the firm’s sizable presence in its specialized equipment niche. “Nobody else in the world has all this under one roof,” says Andy Tiltins, senior vice president. “We design, we manufacture, and we sell the products.”
To be sure, Mayfran International has grown enormously since its origins in a Cleveland garage in the 1930s. And for Mayfran, there’s no end in sight—the company plans to continue expanding by following its successful approach of importing design innovations from other countries—and creating its own products—to continue broadening its equipment offerings in the chip processing and conveying field.
A Scrap Focus
In the most basic terms, Mayfran specializes in two types of equipment: chip and coolant separation/processing systems and conveyors. The company produces both off-the-shelf and customized versions of its equipment for a wide variety of users, including scrap processing operations, machine shops, material recovery facilities, waste-to-energy facilities, integrated manufacturing plants, and more. “We’re basically in all the businesses that scrap processors are involved in,” says Merrill.
Despite the variety of Mayfran customers, the common thread running through its equipment offerings is that “almost every product we build is designed to handle scrap that ends up in traditional scrap recycling operations,” Merrill observes. “Our machinery collects and processes the turnings, stampings, and chips that are picked up by many processors. It would be hard for them to find a facility in America that didn’t have a Mayfran system collecting the material they’re going to be processing.”
And as Tiltins adds, “We’re probably the largest equipment company in the world that’s dedicated to scrap. We take the scrap that’s made by metal cutting or metal stamping machines out of the factory.”
In addition to selling equipment to manufacturers and other scrap generators that wish to make their scrap handling activities more automated and efficient, the firm sells machinery to processors, who purchase it for their own use as well as for their suppliers. One large Midwest scrap processing and trading firm, for example, has purchased four Mayfran systems for its suppliers and is currently buying a million-dollar system to handle stamping scrap at one of its customer’s operations. In this instance, huge conveyors will transport scrap from the stamping machines and dump the material directly into containers or trucks. The system’s popularity can be attributed at least in part to the fact that the conveyor’s mouth moves from side to side ensuring that containers are loaded evenly. Also, the conveyor is equipped with a probe that can sense the height of piled material—once it receives the sign that a container is full, it will move automatically to an empty one.
Even so, Mayfran’s bread-and-butter product is its hinged steel belt Chip-Tote conveyor, a piece of equipment that was originally designed in the 1930s, says Richard Westfall, manager of marketing services. This 21/2 -inch-pitch hinged conveyor was an innovation because it could be integrated into machine tools, automatically removing turnings and chips and allowing the coolant to run through the conveyor and back to the machine.
Though Mayfran continues to produce some conveyors based on the original designs and principles—some patents date from the 1930s and 1940s—it also manufactures newly designed conveyors large enough to use in car shredding operations. “We build a lot of products that are heavy enough and rugged enough to stand the abuse of scrap processing plants,” says Merrill. Tiltins adds that when a customer calls with specific needs, Mayfran will design a conveyor system that fits their particular problem. “We don’t think of conveyors so much as commodities in themselves as solutions to particular needs,” he says.
Aside from making systems that handle metal scrap, Mayfran has started working with the pulp and paper industry, manufacturing rubber belt conveyors equipped with load sensors that feed scrap paper into hydrapulping operations. The sensors detect, for example, a load of 7,000 pounds of paper en route to a batch-fed hydrapulper. After the batch is fed in, the conveyor automatically advances to the next batch, thus regulating the amount of material entering the system. “Systems that are designed to handle baled, corrugated, or high grades are a big business for us,” says Merrill.
From Cleveland to the World
Mey-Fran Engineering Co. was founded in 1933 in Cleveland by George H. Meyfarth and A.J. Franz. And it was to remain in their control—not to mention relatively small—until the 1960s when Fisher Industries bought and expanded the business, modifying the company’s name to Mayfran International and designing its current logo.
Fisher proceeded to merge Mayfran with a number of small companies, including American Monorail. When in the early 1980s Foster-Wheeler Co. bought May-fran, the firm was continuing to grow and acquiring such companies as Sullivan Engineering, which made belts, and Reclamet, a manufacturer of chip processing equipment.
Phillips Industries acquired the company next, and in 1990 Tomkins Plc, a large British holding company with about $5.9 billion in annual revenue and 45,000 employees, took over Phillips, thus adding Mayfran to its stable of some 70 companies worldwide.
Being owned by a multinational corporation has its advantages; Westfall notes, for instance, that “Tomkins provides financial backing but otherwise lets us do our thing.”
The parent company also gives Mayfran an international edge over its competitors, most of which are small operations that specialize in a niche market and bring in $10 million a year—tops, Merrill asserts. “Our competitors here tend to be more regional—much less national, much less international,” agrees Tiltins. And it is exactly Mayfran’s international presence that Merrill views as the firm’s most notable strength.
Importing Ideas
Mayfran’s international presence can be traced to its penchant for finding and importing equipment ideas and products under license from foreign manufacturers.
This practice offers several advantages—one being that foreign ideas and products help keep Mayfran ahead of the environmental regulation curve. As Merrill explains, the requirements for environmental protection generally originate in Europe, so systems built there are already designed to more stringent standards.
Scouring the globe for the best existing equipment ideas also saves Mayfran from reinventing the wheel. “It’s easier to buy our competitors than try to reinvent their products and maybe have a patent violation,” Merrill says. When Japan entered the manufacturing game, for instance, companies there needed a different type of chip and coolant handling approach than the one used by the straight-line transfer machines so prevalent in the American automotive industry. Later, when American manufacturers began setting up their factories using grouped cells of equipment instead of assembly lines, Mayfran found a Japanese company that had already designed products to satisfy these new requirements. The firm began importing the equipment and now builds it in the United States. “Always the concept is: bring the product in, establish the product, and begin manufacturing it,” Merrill says.
Japan has been a rich source of ideas and equipment for Mayfran over the years. Merrill estimates that close to 50 percent of the firm’s current roster—including such products as its magnetic roller separator, magnetic spiked belt separator, and magnetic screw conveyor—has come from its joint venture with Bunri Industries Ltd., a Tokyo-based manufacturer.
The firm has also drawn heavily from European manufacturers, thanks in part to Bruce Terry, president of Mayfran’s U.S. and European divisions, who travels back and forth between both companies and is, therefore, “very tuned in about the marketplaces,” Merrill says.
Mayfran’s European manufacturing facility—located in Landgraaf, Netherlands—is heavily involved in the scrap industry there, building primarily large conveyors and stacker cranes for auto shredders. One product designed especially for the European market is a shredder conveyor with a longer horizontal loading area—around 60 feet—designed to keep up with the infeed demands of a 6,000-hp megashredder. The conveyor’s longer horizontal span enables three or four cranes to feed it at the same time and allows enough material to be piled within reach of the cranes to keep them operating without interruption. While Mayfran has four or five applications like this in England, very few U.S. shredders use these longer conveyors, Merrill says, noting that instead “they typically have one crane and a relatively small conveyor with a small loading area.”
Another European scrap processing convention literally gave rise to another type of Mayfran conveyor. As Merrill explains, scrap operations in Europe typically have much less operating space than U.S. facilities, which creates the need for steeper—and, hence, shorter—conveyors, ones that can elevate material quickly. A normal stacker conveyor with a rubber belt, for example, would have to extend a long way in order to achieve a certain height, and a steep elevation would cause material to fall backward.
To solve the problem, Mayfran designed a hinged steel belt with pushers that keep scrap from rolling backward, so the same elevation can be achieved in less distance, and is currently beginning to market it in the United States.
Recently, Mayfran acquired the license to a state-of-the-art live bottom centrifuge from a German company. The machine features an infeed chute that funnels chips into a hopper outfitted with a live bottom that raises and lowers to force the chips against a wedge wire screen, which then filters and collects machine oil and coolant through a discharge chute. The rotating hopper uses centrifugal force to dry the chips much like a giant salad spinner, before dropping the clean chips out the bottom. “There’s nothing like it available in the United States,” says Merrill.
The Viavent system, another of Mayfran’s recent equipment acquisitions, also came from Germany. A marked departure from traditional in-floor chip and coolant collection systems, the Viavent approach achieves collection and separation through a system of overhead pipes.
The Viavent system is cleaner and quieter than in-floor collection systems, according to Mayfran’s executives, who also play up the system’s environmental safety attributes. Older systems were located below the floor in troughs. Coolant ran along exposed conveyors, which usually released a fine coolant mist into the air. Furthermore, unseen leaks let large quantities of coolant escape into the ground. But with a closed pipe, there is little, if any, leakage. The system can also maintain the “mix” of water- soluble coolant and monitors coolant evaporation in the machines as well as the ratio of coolant to oil.
The overhead pumping approach, reportedly first used by the European automotive industry, is finding broad acceptance and use in other sectors for a variety of reasons. One is tied to the manufacturing trend of pushing to get products from the drawing board into use in the shortest possible time. In order to do that, the manufacturing facilities have to be constructed quickly, and a facility that can eliminate the time required to dig chip-collection trenches by installing a flexible overhead pipe system can get its operation online much more quickly. “This is what every company is trying to do,” says Merrill.
Also, with the cell concept of manufacturing, in which machines can be grouped in a circle or other configuration instead of a traditional straight line, there is no central chip and coolant handling system. Rather, each machine has its own. This manufacturing approach requires a different type of chip and coolant handling through an overhead pipe system like the Viavent.
Offering one example of the system’s application, Mayfran’s principals note that Chrysler’s transmission production plant in Kokomo, Ind., which is currently transitioning to an overhead system, will buy hundreds of new machine tools and conveyors as it shifts to pumping chips and coolant overhead. Each machine tool discharges into a box-like pumpback station, where coolant and chips are collected and pumped into the overhead system. Some machine tools have individual conveyors and shredders attached. Chips must be very small to travel through pipes with the coolant to a central filtration unit, where the coolant is filtered clean to about 20 microns and pumped back to the machine tools. The chips settle to the bottom and are taken out of the tank, dried, and collected by a scrap recycler.
While Mayfran certainly has imported its share of equipment ideas and products, it also exports new technology to its own foreign operations. “We’re international, so the technology flow goes both ways,” says Tiltins. “We’ve brought a lot of ideas to this country that were born in Japan or Europe, and some of the things we do in Japan and Europe are hatched here. So it’s a truly international exchange of information.”
The firm creates and modifies its equipment exclusively on what Mayfran says is one of the largest, most sophisticated computer-aided design—CAD—networks in the industry. Among its features, this system is networked, so the firm’s 50 or so engineers can communicate with each other electronically as they design new equipment or redevelop concepts brought in from other markets.
Among the many products Mayfran’s engineers have created is the ConSep 2000, a combination conveyor/coolant cleaner that answers the need of many manufacturing and machining operations for virtually chip-free coolant.
Earlier Chip-Totes worked with machine tools that ran at 1,000 or 2,000 rpm, using about 5 to 10 gallons per minute of coolant. The problem was that they could only separate a small number of chips from a small amount of coolant and might send coolant back to the machine tool still containing chips the size of a fingernail. The next generation of separators sent coolant back that was clean—99.999 percent by weight—but engineers couldn’t guarantee a size.
Mayfran’s ConSep 2000, in contrast, can serve a machine that runs at 30,000 rpm using 300 gallons per minute of coolant and can reportedly screen coolant to a purity of 50 microns—about the size of the point of a needle, according to the company.
Sticking to One’s Strengths
As Mayfran looks ahead, it expects continued strong sales to manufacturers, machine shops, and other scrap generators, but also sees much room for growth in sales to scrap recycling operations. As Tiltins explains, the scrap industry is becoming more consolidated, which is creating larger scrap corporations with greater resources, broader business diversity, and potentially more use for Mayfran’s lines of equipment. “Mayfran was more supplier-oriented before, so the scrap processor is the frontier for consolidation,” he says.
As chip and coolant handling systems become more complex, Mayfran is also finding itself building more of the essential system parts. Its purchase of the Viavent system, for example, prompted it to build the system’s related pumpback stations, shredders, conveyors, controls, and overhead control tank. “This is expanding Mayfran’s business significantly,” says Merrill.
Yet the company is careful not to stray too far from its equipment roots. It knows its strengths and sticks to them. “We’re trying to stay in the chip and coolant handling business and really not get too heavily involved in other aspects,” says Merrill.
Within its niche, however, Mayfran can be counted on to continue living up to its international reputation as it blankets the globe, looking for the best and newest in conveyors, as well as chip and coolant collection and processing systems. •
True to its name, Mayfran International scours the globe in search of the best and brightest in conveying and chip processing technology for both scrap generating and scrap processing applications.