What happens “behind the scenes” to ensure we can start the day refreshed?

Anyone who appreciates a comfortable sleep is surely familiar with pocket spring mattresses. They owe their success to their use of a large number of steel springs, each enclosed in its own fabric pocket. This provides a level of stability that is impossible to achieve in conventional sprung mattresses, significantly reducing the pressure on shoulders, hips and spine. What’s more, the number and resistance of the individual springs can be varied to create different comfort zones. In addition to innovative specialist machinery, our customer Macau Commercial has specialised in efficiently producing precisely this key component for pocket spring mattresses.

Production at record speed

TaiWa Commercial was founded by Macau Spring Manufacturer and Macau TaiWa Machinery in 2011. Right from the outset, it focussed on all aspects of pocket spring mattress production. One incredible detail shows just how refined the company’s expertise has become – it now manufactures 140 springs a minute. In other words, it has achieved production speeds unrivalled by any of its competitors worldwide. Although the machinery was initially constructed using steel, the company switched to item aluminium profiles in 2015.

“It is so easy to screw the profiles together – it’s much faster than welding, which is what we had to do with steel parts. It also gives us far more flexibility if we have to modify a construction. The aluminium profiles are much easier on the eye, too,” says Nelson Wu, the company’s director. Three different machines are used. The first winds the springs into their very special shape and sews them into their shaping pockets – all at incredible speed. The second machine cuts the long strips of springs to size, before the pockets are joined together in the third and final step. Around 95 percent of the structures in the factory now consist of solutions from item, with the wide range of profile technology in the MB Building Kit System playing a vital role. It is perfect for the various areas of application.

Flexible and environmentally friendly

It is easy to swap out individual components and reuse profiles in other places. This fits in perfectly with the efforts of the Chinese government to encourage companies to take more account of environmental factors. According to Nelson Wu, using our aluminium profiles has as much to do with careful observation of western markets as it does with industry developments in Asia. “We are guided by global competition – especially what is happening in Europe and the United States – so we know that item’s profiles are often used there. At the same time, there is a new trend in specialist mechanical engineering toward using aluminium profiles to build machinery. There is therefore a lot to be said for using item.”

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