The company, Modular Wall Systems, has been using press brakes and guillotines supplied by Maxitec, which specialises in automated sheet metal production machinery.Maxitec said that by developing this wall-building system, Modular Wall Systems had eliminated the need for bricklayers, renderers, earthmoving equipment and strip footings, and basically had made messy construction a thing of the past.Modular Wall Systems director Nicholas Holden says uptake of this technology has happened quickly mainly because it counters some of the long-standing problems suffered by traditional methods in building walls and partitions.“It has become very difficult to go into difficult terrain expecting to build walls out of bricks or concrete because heavy materials make the work environment relatively dangerous,” Holden said.”The mining industry, for example, is one where you are rarely dealing with nice, level, safe surfaces, so the advent of lightweight modular sections has made this area easier to handle.“We proved that recently in doing a partition project for a Newman mine where the only significant piece of machinery required was a small digger.“Composite panels account for the majority of our product, but all the structural work is done by the support posts.”Maxitec said the modular walls had upright metal posts which linked the modular sandwich panels. Maxitec added that although the panels were manufactured from just 1mm sheet metal, the product’s strength was purely down to the bend profile, which gave these posts maximum strength and a long life expectancy.”Once we had engineered the ideal bend profile for their wall posts, the press brake locks in coordinates for each bend sequence and the client can produce these over and over,” Maxitec sales and marketing manager Andrew Bentrup said. He said that generally, these 1mm gauge posts are 4.5m high and sit directly in the ground. Modular Wall Systems currently sells its product for use in roads and construction, mining, and general industrial in and around factories, as well as in the commercial and domestic building sectors.
