New era in our company

[ChadInColo]

Hello all, I have been on this board doing some research, just thought I would let everyone know our company is taking a big step into the future. We are currently an aerospace machine shop, doing some subassemblies, especially for Boeing. We just issued a PO for an ABB robotic weld cell with a Fronius power source for my project. We are really looking forward to the oportunities this will help open up for us. As I said, we have the one project that will make the robot cell economically favorable and will have plenty of extra capacity on it to sell. Everyone in the company is excited, hope I have good things to report soon.

Just wanted to say thanks for everyone, not just in this topic but throughout the board, it is a great resource. If anyone is interested I will keep you updated on progress.

 

[Barry1961]

I a past life I did intergration for Nachi, OTC and Fanuc welding robots along with some custom designs. If this is your first welding robot you will have a learning curve which will be mainly about your own process, not the robot. Most first time welding robots apps. either end up with the customer loving it or hating it. The ones who end up loving it will know a lot more about their product and have a higher quality product in the end.
Most problems with first timers are mainly with part size and material variations which you should not have being a machine shop. One other common problem is the straightness of the wire/rod if you are doing MIG or TIG.
If you setup a location test point on a rigid part of the fixture when you first get the robot it will save a lot of time during the first few months. A simple test point we used for MIG was a pin the OD of the contact tip that had a sleeve about .1mm larger bore on it. We would then teach a point a known distance (a nickel thickness) above the post where the sleeve would freely slide over the contact tip of the MIG gun. This is a quick way to test the whole system for alignment. The most common problem the first few months will probably be bent welding torches. And teaching a path with a bent torch can waste a lot of time.


Hope you do very well.

Barry

 

[ChadInColo]

Thanks for the input. The parts we are welding will all be machined parts and thus should have good fit up. We have an experienced welder on board already.

One of the benefits we see with the ABB is the Bullseye TCP checker, and the tactile sensing. I have made myself educated enough to know that the robot will only produce good parts if you feed it good parts.

We hope to fill a small niche, there aren't many weld shops who deal in machine shop tolerance work, and we haven't found any machine shops who aggressively go after contracts with welding involved.