Sheet metal processing with high standards and tradition

Hans Schröder Maschinenbau GmbH is celebrating its 75th anniversary.
The family business, which has grown into the Schröder Group, now offers a wide range of machines for folding, cutting, beading, flanging and rounding.

The history of the Schröder Group began on September 20, 1949, when Hans Schröder registered a repair business for agricultural machinery in Wessobrunn, Upper Bavaria.
With the start of series production of press brakes in 1963, the transformation into the company that today enjoys international recognition as a manufacturer of sheet metal working machines for trade and industry was complete.

Eccentric guillotine shears were added in 1965, followed by the first motorized shears in 1968.
Over the years, motorized folding benches for increasingly thicker sheets were the product group for which Hans Schröder Maschinenbau received special attention, as these machines were to increasingly replace another class of machines: More and more tasks for which a press brake was once absolutely necessary can now be completed with high precision, convenience and surface protection using folding machines.
Another product group in which the Schröder Group plays a leading role was added in 2006 with the integration of Fasti-Werke in Wermelskirchen (Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis): round bending machines.
The company’s good reputation is not only based on high-quality spindle drives without overtravel and solid, torsion-free machine bodies.
The machine manufacturer Schröder-Fasti’s recipe for success lies in the roll geometry, or more precisely, in the form of crowning it has developed: similar to the crowning of the folding beam of a folding machine, the crowning of the rolls counteracts the deflection of the tool in the face of the bending forces and the resulting uneven bending results.
Other machine families added with Fasti are beading and bending machines.

Always with power reserves

“First and foremost, we pay attention to the mechanical qualities. The basis for precise and repeatable bending is a robust, torsion-resistant machine body. We only use high-quality drives and make sure that our machines have reserves of strength and stability beyond their respective specifications,” promises Franz Schröder, Managing Director of Hans Schröder Maschinenbau and son of the founder, who died in 1994.
In addition to mechanics, Schröder pays particular attention to control systems and software – this is the only way to get the most out of the machines for complex bent parts.
“Unlike many other manufacturers, we don’t buy in ready-made control systems for our machines, but set up our own software development very early on. This pays off for our customers: The control system and machine are perfectly matched, and we have the ability to make customer-specific adjustments at short notice,” Schröder continues.
As the controls of the Schröder machines are very easy to learn for anyone who knows how to bend sheet metal, the machines are also very popular in companies that have never had anything to do with numerical controls before.
This may be one reason why there is no clear distinction between trade and industrial machines and why, for example, the PowerBend Professional UD introduced in 2013 is a bestseller among trade businesses – a machine that is actually an adaptation of technology from high-performance industrial machines for the thin sheet metal sector.

Tradition and innovation

However, solid machines with maximum repeat accuracy are only one reason for decades of success.
The Schröder Group also expands the technical possibilities of mechanical sheet metal processing through its own innovations.
Time and again, the Bavarian and Rhenish machine builders find ways to form sheet metal even more efficiently.
The most prominent example of an efficiency-enhancing function in the swivel bending machines is the up-and-down bending beam.
In 2004, Hans Schröder Maschinenbau came up with the idea of a folding beam that could not only bend from bottom to top, but also from top to bottom.
The technology, first presented at a trade fair in 2006, proved to be a milestone in terms of efficiency and ergonomics.
Performing counter-bends in a single work step without having to turn the sheet metal saves time and manual work.
The production of large façade elements, for example, can be automated by one person, making it highly efficient.
Another innovation follows the same basic idea as the up-and-down bending beam: last year, the company launched the EVO DuoBend, an innovative folding machine with two independently operated bending beams.
The folding machine for sheets up to 5 mm thick won the “Blechexpo best award 2023” at its first presentation.
Web: www.schroedergroup.eu/de