The Ductwork Machinery
HVAC Factories Trust

Most HVAC duct workshops are not labour-cost limited — they are labour-time limited. A manual rectangular duct shop running 0.8 mm galvanised through a shear, a hand brake, a Pittsburgh lockformer and a flanging station typically produces 250–400 m² of finished duct per shift with three to four operators. The same shop replanned around an SBAL-V auto duct line produces 1,800–2,500 m² per shift with one operator and one helper, on the same coil and the same wall thickness. The labour input drops by roughly two thirds and the daily output rises by a factor of five to seven. Those numbers come straight from the production logs of SBKJ customers in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Australia and Egypt.

Spiral duct shops show the same pattern at a different scale. An SBTF-1500 tubeformer paired with a 5-tonne uncoiler and a flying shear runs Φ100–1500 mm round duct continuously at line speeds up to 60 m/min, with one operator handling the cut-off table and the finished duct buffer. A workshop adding an SBTF-1602 alongside an existing SBTF-1500 doubles its diameter envelope from Φ1500 to Φ1600 mm without doubling the operator count, because the second machine runs in flexible-shift parallel mode rather than dedicated continuous mode. SBKJ engineers will model this shift pattern explicitly in the project quotation, with a labour calendar that maps machine hours to shift hours over a typical month.

The third lever is downstream integration. A flanging station, a corner-mounting press and a sealing station that all share the same TDF profile remove handling time between operations and let a single operator move duct from forming to flanging to packing in one continuous flow. SBKJ supplies all three stations from the same catalogue with matched tooling, which is the reason a fully integrated SBAL-V shop runs at lower labour cost per square metre than a same-output competitor running mixed-brand stations. The full TCO model is part of every SBKJ engineering quotation — ask for it in your first email and we will return it inside 12 hours.