THE PROBLEM
A machine shop was turning down the surface of a round that had a special plating applied and wanted to utilize a new Haas automated turning center, but the machine was only set do smaller parts and up to no more than 20 at a time. At which point, operators would have to stop the machine, enter the safety gate and reload. Our customer wanted to be able to run continuously, loading and unloading as the machine was running without interrupting safety circuit.
THE PD&B SOLUTION
PD&B worked directly with Haas to determine the best way to interact with the OEM equipment in a way that didn’t compromise any of the capabilities or functionality of the existing system. It ended up with two conveyors (infeed and outfeed), an eject chute, custom robot tooling in exchange for Haas’ standard gripper, and some simple PLC logic and hardware to control to extra items.
The end result was continuous running with built in accumulation to give operators a chance to do other tasks while machine is full and running. We tied our cycle start communication directly into Haas’, so that if a customer decided to revert the original equipment back to stock, it would be an easy thing to accomplish.