Fastening, Joining & Assembly

I spent many years in the design of production machinery.

There were numerous times I was competing with the likes of Cincinnati-Millicron on large projects. I won them all with dedicated work stations.

An example:

Take a forged aluminum part approximately 24" in diameter, dish shaped, 10" deep and drill and tap 28 holes in it.

There were 3 sizes and 6 depths of holes, so called blind tapping.

In the 1980's C-M came up with a $450,000. Machining Center that required a $60,000. Annual Maintenance Contract. By the way, that was the biggest C-M I had ever seen! It took up over 250sq/ft of floor space.

It took the C-M 46 minutes to do the part.

My design:
It was 16' long and 4' wide. It was 4 stations with automatic transfer between the 2 work stations and load/finished stations.

The work stations had 28 Rockwell Self-feed Drills 28 Self-feed Tappers. Cycle time was less than 4 minutes a finished part. Cost was under $100,000. No maintenance contracts required.

Needless to say I won that contract and many more.

With the exception of Spray Painting and Spot Welding Robots I have not seen very many instances where dedicated work stations are not the fastest and most cost effective way to produce parts and assemblies. And they do not need more than your average plant maintenance personnel to maintain them.

applications are become more with the different types, especially since they are coming out for sanitary applications.

I had developed an idea from a company that had a poor engineering department, They spent spent $500,000.00 to develop a deverter for 1 - 5 lb cheese to go from 2 lanes to 1 lane. They had asked me come in when it was too late to make it work, it sat on the OEM's floor for over (2) years. And asked to make it work. I told them, its hard to stop an abortion. (engineers gone wild).

Have seen a robot that was used for aligning small industrial parts on a conveyor belt for the automotive industry.

I applied it for aligning, deverting single to (2) rows or back to single for the pizza crust industry.

I had offered them this as option with costs that would be less then $100,000.00. it was from a proven design, handled a larger rate, more diverse options and configuration, and took up less of a foot print. Unfortunatey, the company could not overcome its losses from other nonperforming "engineered equipment".

The Robot looks like a spider, lite weight and since having less enertia, it enable it to make very quick and precise movements for placing the product. Since the baking industry had a lower sanitary standard than dairy, it was quite easy to apply this.