Flatteners are the most common type of steel coil leveler used to improve the quality of flat-rolled products and steel sheets. Typically, flatteners are used in press feed applications or simple cut-to-length lines.

What Does a Flattener Do?

Different coil-straightening techniques are often classified as flattening, straightening, and leveling. The incoming coil strip is bent and unbent around numerous pairs of rolls to achieve coil straightening. After the sheet metal has passed its yield point, the rolls alternately stretch and compress the top and lower surfaces until both surfaces have the same surface length. This results in the coil strip’s surface-to-surface length differences being corrected by this process.

A surface-to-surface differential appears most often as a coil “sets” or “cross bows”. When the steel sheet is coiled, “coil set” happens. During winding, the sheet’s inside surface contracts while the exterior surface is put under stress, creating a bit of stretching. As a result, the inside of the sheet is shorter than the outside but still maintains its width. “Cross bow” happens when the material’s bottom side, measured across the coil’s width, is shorter than its top side.

Flatteners pass metal stock through one or more pairs of rollers to reduce thickness and make the material uniform and remove the defects described above.

Inventory of Flatteners

VX LLC offers a variety of quality used roll flatteners capable of working with several different sizes, depending on your manufacturing project’s requirements. In addition, some machines feature hydraulic threading drive options for pull-thru applications.

Our flattener machines are designed to allow quick roll change, so there is no increase in downtime and less maintenance is required. Most come with entry pinch rolls to assist the threading of material into the flattener. For surface-critical material, special polyurethane roll coverings can also be applied.

Many of our flatteners offer hydraulic or electric roll positioning with closed loop roll position controls, custom operator display panels, and automatic setup options. In addition, stand-alone electrical control cabinets and dedicated hydraulic power units can often be provided for self- contained systems.

Check our extensive inventory of flatteners and other vital manufacturing equipment.