So, three robots walk into a bar…oops, wrong story. Although, what you’re about to read is indeed about three robots, or at least, three manufacturing companies that have embraced robotic automation and are now much better for their investment.
We’ve been here before. In the May 2023 edition of Manufacturing Engineering magazine, we spoke to a handful of automation providers, including FANUC America, Universal Robots and Absolute Machine Tools. That article’s catchy title is “Automation: Today and Beyond” and re-counts some grim statistics, illustrating how the labor shortage isn’t getting any better and that manufacturers of all sizes and capabilities should take a serious look at automation in its many forms.
But rather than once again asking the people who build, sell and service those robots for advice, it makes more sense to follow up with a few of their customers who actually use robots each day. So, here’s the “beyond” part of that previous story, starting with a machine shop in Ohio.
Despite the grim statistics just mentioned, Andy McCartney, president and owner of Bowden Manufacturing Corp. of Willoughby, Ohio, isn’t far from giving up on flesh and blood labor. Visitors to the company’s website are told to “GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY AND BUILD STUFF.” It’s great advice, but unfortunately, not enough young people are heeding it.
This helps explain why Bowden began an apprenticeship program seven years ago and has been fortunate to have brought on dozens of interns from nearby Cleveland State University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Akron.
“Many of these are kids who want to be design engineers, but they don’t have much mechanical experience, so we teach them how to run machines, inspect parts and eventually, they’re able to program and set up jobs,” McCartney says. “It’s good for everyone involved.”
Apprentices are a great asset during the summertime, but it’s hard enough finding regular, year-round employees, let alone ones willing to work second and third shift. Since McCartney and his 55 employees need to keep an almost equal number of machine tools running as much as possible, he invested in the company’s first robot last year, a FANUC CRX-10 from Absolute Machine Tools in nearby Cleveland.
The collaborative arm spends its days, nights and weekends loading cut pieces of aluminum extrusion roughly a foot long into a pair of Haas Mini-Mills, then removing the finished pieces after about a half an hour of machining.
“We do a lot of defense and aerospace work here, but this is a family of parts for various firearm manufacturers,” he explains. “Each part number is fairly unique when it comes out of the machine, but the workholding is mostly the same, so even though the individual orders are relatively small, between them we have the quantities needed to run the two mills pretty much non-stop, seven days a week.”
Robot programming and operation has been a “fun learning curve” for his team, notes McCartney, although it hasn’t been a trivial one. Determining which grippers to use, presenting the blanks to the robot, storing the finished workpiece safely and integrating the robot and light curtain with the machines was a new experience for this 72-year-old machine shop.
Jeff Bennett, a senior automation and controls engineer for Absolute, was responsible for the installation. He explains that Absolute provided the custom, laser-cut “grid table” used to stage the raw material and hold the parts when done. No area scanners, light curtains or fencing was needed in this particular application due to the cobot’s force– and speed-limiting technology. Since the ma-chines already had auto-doors, the installation was fairly straightforward.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty was the tight fit between the part bore and the shaft used to position it.
“They tended to bind a little bit and the robot was erroring out, but Bowden machined a couple ‘thou off the fixture to give it more clearance,” Bennett says. “There’s also a keyway that we had to align, so that took a little work to get everything clocked just right, but overall it turned out to be a fun project.”
McCartney agrees. “The people from Absolute did a really nice job, as did our internal staff sup-porting them. We also had support from MAGNET, a local organization that promotes manufacturing, which helped with grant money and project coordination. We’ve made some tweaks to the cell since then—little stuff like probing to make sure there’s actually material there before the cycle starts and figuring out ways to maximize machine utilization—but overall, I have to say it’s been a great experience. Probably the biggest problem has been that the Mini Mills don’t have a removable chip pan, so it’s tough to get chips out of the machine, but that’s not the robot’s fault. Regard-less, we set a record last week in the number of hours generated from those two machines.”
When asked whether the experience was good enough to invest in additional automation, McCartney’s response was an enthusiastic yes. “It’s been less than eight months and it’s almost paid for, so we’re definitely going to move forward on the next one. The math is super easy. The only thing holding us back right now is finding the engineering time needed to implement it, we’re so busy.”
Everyone knows that automation and prototyping don’t go hand in hand. Au contraire, says Brian Kippen, president and chief executive officer of KAD Models & Prototypes Inc.
With facilities on each coast, one in Alameda, Calif. and the other in East Randolph, Vt., he’s destroying that low-volume, high-mix paradigm with a pair of automated machine tending solutions at his shop in Vermont.
Total employee count between the two facilities? Just twelve. As with Bowden Manufacturing’s example, this helps dispel yet another long-held industry myth: automation is only for the big shops.
“Production shops have some excellent reasons to use automation, but it’s less clear when you’re doing prototyping and extremely low-volume work,” says Kippen. “Most of our orders are five pieces and under, so when I began looking for a solution, I wanted what I think of as a cafeteria approach, in that everything is palletized and whatever’s on the pallet is lunch for the machine. That’s what sold me on the Trinity system.”
He’s talking about Trinity Automation out of Southern California, a manufacturer of “Automated Pallet Systems for CNC Machining Centers” that uses FANUC industrial robots, SCHUNK end effectors and according to Kippen, can be married to pretty much any machine. “Both of ours are paired with a five-axis machining center, one to a Matsuura MX 850 and the other to a Haas UMC 750.”
That doesn’t make it easy. Efficient manufacturing is a matter of eliminating bottlenecks, Kippen explains. And for a prototype shop, it’s the highly skilled staff who can carry parts from CAD file to completion, people whose days are spent proving out jobs: programming the toolpaths, setting up the cutters and workholding and then running the first article. There’s little time to machine the handful of parts—if that—remaining on the order. Automation, he says, serves as the second and third shift.
“Assuming there’s more than one, we set up the first component and load the cell with the remaining balance. The next person will then get in there and start setting up their project, prove that out and so on,” Kippen says. “When we go home at night, the robot takes over.”
The KAD Models largest cell has 55 pallets. These might not always be full when the lights go out, but are usually enough to keep the CNC busy until morning and sometimes through the weekend. With robust chip management and a full coolant sump, Kippen says you can run for many hours with no one around. “Our longest unattended cycle time is 176 hours.”
But he cites several additional benefits to his approach, one of which may come as a surprise to anyone wringing their hands over the industry’s pervasive skilled labor shortage. Because the company’s “production” occurs after hours, he and his small team have more time for what’s really important: employee training.
Kippen says, “That’s one of the largest lifts in any manufacturing facility, and it can be quite difficult when you’re trying to keep equipment running at full capacity all the time. Adding automation actually frees you to spend more time mentoring people. In most shops, you’ll start out sweeping the floor or tending the saw, and over the years, you’ll work your way to machine operator and maybe programmer. But I’ve found that, if you teach from the top down and get them engaged in the manufacturing process more quickly, you end up getting a very different type of person, someone who can be more agile, more loyal and who reaches a higher wage more quickly. That breeds a great deal of loyalty.”
As for the return on investment (ROI), Kippen calculated it would take five years based on a 40-hour work week, maybe less given the higher shop rate for prototype work. What he didn’t consider was the added expense that comes with tooling up a hundred or so pallets, an exercise he’s still engaged in. Even so, he was pleasantly surprised at the outcome. “Every shop’s situation is unique, but for us, adding robots delivered an average of five additional hours of production time per ma-chine, which comes out to an ROI of one year.”
Scott Paulk of Carrollton, Texas, has had an even rosier ROI experience. “We paid off our first robot within six months.”
Paulk is the engineering manager at Alexandria Extrusion South, a division of Minnesota-based Alexandria Industries Inc., which boasts five facilities and more than 400 employees. The robot he’s referring to is a Universal Robot (UR) the company purchased nine years ago. Since then, they’ve added two more UR cobots and three robots from FANUC, all tasked with CNC machine tending in the company’s 26,000-square-foot facility.
Each is used to tend one of 15 CNC machine tools, giving the company between six and 12 hours of unattended operation per machine each day, including weekends.
But note the term cobot and robot mentioned earlier. If you haven’t gone droid shopping yet, you might be wondering about the differences and why Alexandria has both styles of robotic arm.
We won’t go into the specifics of cost, speed, accuracy and safety except to say that each has its unique strengths and buyers should do their homework. For Paulk, the decision is largely based on product mix. “If it’s more of a low-volume, high-mix scenario, we’ll usually lean towards a collaborative solution, whereas a robot with its greater speed is best suited for production machining.”
His automation adventure began in 2015. Ironically, the first job was quite similar to the hand-guards made at Bowden Manufacturing, as workholding and chip management proved to be the steeper parts of the robotic learning curve. Yet integration to the CNC created additional challenges.
“It was kind of a crazy journey,” Paulk says. “I was like a kid at Christmas when the robot finally arrived. The original plan was to send someone down from our main plant to help with training and implementation but that was delayed slightly due to scheduling conflicts. Anxious to get started, I began making some phone calls and eventually decided to go with Olympus Controls, a UR distributor out of Irving. I’m glad I did. Between their knowledge of robotics and my CNC experience, we had it running in just a couple of days. It was a pretty impressive feat, and I’d like to give regional manager Nick Armenta a big shoutout for his support.”
Even so, the following weeks were filled with small but annoying adjustments to the doors, grippers and tailstock used to support the workpiece. Along the way, Paulk learned some valuable lessons. The first was to purchase the right type of end effector.
“We had to play around with the air pressure a lot to get the clamping force and stroke length just right,” he says. “That’s what led me down the Robotiq Hand-E path on our second and third cobots. They’re miles ahead of where we started.”
The second lesson was the importance of having CNC machines “robot ready.” On the first integration, the CNC had been purchased with a robotic package, so it already had the auto doors, probing, air blast and optional M-code outputs needed for communication. However, this wasn’t the case with several of the later installations, forcing Paulk and his team to reverse engineer the robot ready machines, making the integration far more time-consuming. And even on the first ma-chine, they had to wire in a hydraulic pump when the handguard job dried up, and they began using it for different work.
“Long story short, if your machine’s robot ready, that’s awesome. It’s going to make your journey so much easier and there’s no reason to wait,” Paulk says.
“But if you have an older machine or one not designed with a robot in mind, you’re probably looking at a fair amount of effort and some additional expense to get everything running. That’s why any new equipment we order will definitely be robot ready. And taking that one step further, we’re also looking at a turnkey solution right now for a pair of pallet-changing vertical machining centers, where we’ll have a robot load and unload the pallets while also performing some additional operations like washing and punching the parts afterward. That will extend our lights-out capabilities even further.”
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