A salesman brought the Heck Industries model out for us to try. I'll admit it, it does a great job at beveling column flanges and milling a bead of weld completely flush.....just a bit pricey for our liking. The guys here can setup and burn the flanges of a column with the buggo track torch quicker than we could bevel the flanges with that hand held milling machine....If the flanges were thin, I could see the milling machine winning the race, but we also ran into another problem....we could only mill the top flange of the beams that were beveled for field moment welding...the bottom flange would still have to be burned with the torch because it is beveled so that all of the field welding is downhand and not over head.

Hello Lawrence, over Christmas break last year I worked a shut-down of sorts, where they were going through and reinforcing all of the roof beams in a large manufacturing facility. 1" flat bar was fitted and stitch-welded on both sides of the web on the underside of the top flange. It required beveling one edge of a 1"x5" flat bar along it's edge for the full length of a number of 20' bars in order to clear a pre-existing weld when the beams were fabricated. They originally attempted to do this with a track burner, major distortion issues. They finally got smart and invested in a couple of the Heck bevelers, likely the very model you are considering. I felt that they did an excellent job and also very quickly. They are also very capable of doing some serious bevel preparation with a single pass. Only real criticism I can recall had to do with the screws that fastened the inserts to the spindle assembly, if you weren't fairly careful you could damage them and make it hard to do the change-outs. So if you go this route certainly stock a supply of inserts as well as the retention screws that hold them in. Best regards, Allan

Hi

We do alot of beveling of plates as well. I've been wanting to look into these bevelers for years as well. We do the majority of it now on track mounted "Bug Burners", which works great and very quick with small setups. Would love to hear more from folks who are using these bevelers...