Wood, Paper and Pulp

Long Lasting Equipment​

✅ Wet environments with chemicals and residue pulp can be extremely challenging for electro mechanical devices, as well as cutting machines with a lot of projectiles being able to hit equipment. These environments often easily break equipment, incurring large replacement costs, downtime and in the case of safety devices potentially dangerous situations.

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✅ Fortress has a range of heavy duty equipment, amGardpro, design to cope with such environments and last several years on large wood saws as well as in pulp processing plants. This will reduce your replacement costs significantly and prevent downtime, often the much larger monetary saving.​

Less Downtime​

✅ Our interlocks are built to last, our amGardpro range has undergone 5,000,000 cycles in testing to ensure they last, even in harsh environments with lots of use.​

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✅ This ensures that you reduce the number of equipment failures to stop unnecessary downtime when something goes wrong, it is not uncommon for us to get a request for a quote on products we have supplied 20+ years ago​

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✅ Even if you have inhouse spares, a machine being down for an hour while units are replaced can have significant costs so the longer they last the better.​

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Whole body access protection without presence sensing​

✅ In the wood, paper, pulp and saw industry there are many whole body access areas which can be hard to see from the restart point, what makes this worse is that these areas have a lot of pulp or wood chippings being deposited. This combination makes whole body access very challenging as presence sensing is venerable to a lot of nuisance tripping.​

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✅ Ensuring you prevent unexpected start up is vital as someone maintaining or fixing a machine can be put in a lot of danger if this occurs.​

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✅ This makes Fortress’ extracted personnel (or safety) key a great solution for the wood, paper, pulp and saw sector, the hazardous zone cannot be accessed until a key has been removed from Fortress’ interlock, this will then prevent the machine from being restarted while the operator has the personnel key with them. This also ensures fast access and restart to prevent unwanted downtime.​

Safety systems for heavy machinery applications with no PLC​

✅ Often heavy machinery, such as wood chopping machinery, is not controlled by a PLC but is turned off and on using a large isolator when access is required. Other sources of energy may also need to be controlled before access.​

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✅ Trapped key systems allow complex logic to take place without a computer system, hazardous energy can be shut down in a specified sequence and used to obtain access to a hazardous space.​

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✅ Stainless steel trapped key interlocks can be used for outdoor or wet environments.​

Cheaper and faster installation​

✅ Long cable runs due to the equipment being large, or at least long for rolling machines or tree cutters, can incur hefty installation costs. 

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✅ Networked Fortress products can reduce any cable runs by large amounts and help save commissioning and installation time. Daisy chaining our connected products further saves on these costs.​

Fast Re-start to Prevent downtime​

✅ Having machine controls as part of the interlock on the door access point you can speed up machine restart once a blocking has been clear or issue delt with.

​✅ amGardpro and tGard units can have interlocks fully customisable machine controls from buttons to E-stops, lamps and selection switches. All can be custom engraved as well!​