THE PROBLEM
Assembly of garage door hinges at customer’s facility required significant dexterity and would lead to diminished outputs as shifts progressed due to operator fatigue.
THE PD&B SOLUTION
The solution ended up combining existing shuttling methods from the customer, a rearrangement of the assembly process and integration of updated technology. The parts were fed with all new bowl feeders to eliminate the most operator-intensive portion of the process with pneumatic pick and place units. The shuttling assembly was composed of rectangular pallets being pneumatically shuttled around the frame. This was the major method carried over from the previous machine. The crux of the whole process was inserting the tubes into the two halves of the hinge and that was accomplished with a method we had utilized on a project 3 years before.
A servo-hydraulic crimping cylinder was used to provide high adjustability as well as accurate feedback. A the end of the project, the customer purchased three of these machines, can run 4 different part numbers on the equipment, is able to maintain cycle times under 2 seconds per part and reports that they are roughly 4x more efficient than they were before the automation.