In-house Conveyor System

[MadMango]

I'm looking for resources & information about conveyor systems for final assembly. I work at a manufacturing plant, and we are trying to determine if making our own "conveyor system" for final assembly of our products would be cost-effective over purchasing a turn-key solution.

We have worked out that we will need 10 stations with 20min work times. Our products will be manually assembled, and have a finished weight of 300lb. We plan to build 4 products with about 5 configurations each. Products have about 300 parts. Included in the 10 stations is the ability to cycle test the product, load it to 600lb, then move it into packaging.

We are considering to make "carts" that follow a rail system on the floor, but are concerned about work off of items, and how to take them out of the conveyor line. We are not looking for an automated system, except for perhaps a light or other indicator to tell workers that their 20mins are up and the line will be moving.

Any pointers would be great, as I am a product designer not a manufacturing/automation engineer.

[green]"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."[/green]

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[tripleZ]

Dorner has always worked well with us when providing conveyors. Although 300 lbs may be exceeding their limitations. My parts down get that high, so I don't normally ask. But they might be able to quote you a design solution.

To warn you, they aren't cheap by any stretch of the imagination.

http://www.dorner.com

 

[tygerdawg]

I saw something elegantly simple once upon a time. It was a linear assembly line, which of course violates modern cell-think of U-shaped assembly lines.

It was a rail system fab'ed out of common structural shapes. It had carriages with flat UHMW platens and fab'ed with structural shapes and casters to hold gearmotors upto 300-400 pounds. The carriages were at a good ergonomic working height. They were manually pushed along from station to station. With this system, one had to be careful about getting fingers caught between carriages, but you can purchase conveyor stops from conveyor manufacturers to fix this problem. At the end of the line, the gearmotors were lifted off using chainhoists. There was a manual trapdoor mechanism to allow the empty carriage to freely roll on a slanted rail back to the beginning underneath the top-level rail. At the beginning, there was a pneumatic system to raise each carriage back to the top rail.

Then again, you can spend a lot of money with a conveyor salesman to do the same thing.

TygerDawg

 

[MadMango]

TripleZ, thanks for the link. We haven't set a cost to our system yet, so its hard to compare to a turn-key/custom solution from an outside source.

Tygerdawg, your example sounds almost exactly what we have envisioned. We definately going the linear vs u-shaped line.

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