Press SET UP REDUCTION

[AndrewUK]

Hi has anyone got any reference material on Set Up reduction for a press.

~I am fine with concepts of set up reduction but wondered is any one has any electronic copies of reference material relating to presses, any other areas would be intresting.

 

[tripleZ]

Stamping press, molding press...haven't read any on those. Being that we're going through a plant wide set-up reduction phase on our presses, the best I can tell you is to video record a couple of jobs from start to finish, then watch them. It helps if your video camera has a time recorder so that you can mark down events as they happen. If you haven't done so already, you'll probably be amazed at what you see.

For some press styles, companies like System 3R sell removeable diesets that can be set outside the press significantly decreasing downtime. I believe Dorst, Gasbarre, and a few others sell removeable die sets for their presses. Or you can design your own with a few more bells and whistles.

 

[ajack1]

Andrew type S.M.E.D (single minute exchange of die) into a search engine there is a lot of stuff out there.

 

[griffengm]

AndrewUK,
Check out Society of Manufacturing Engineers. They have a lot of multimedia material, much of it specific to your topic.

Griffy

 

[bladeblaster]

What type of press? I work with satmping presses, ease of die location, is a major factor. As is reliable recording of last settings. Small cahnges to the set are often required after a change of raw material, it is worth recording these changes so that they don't need to be found out again.

We dowel the top plate to the bolster, and use sprung loaded location spiggots from the top plate to the press ram. This means that the die is located within seconds and is always guaranteed to be square and central to the ram.

Lack of ancilary equipment / tools is usualy a major time consumer, where time is spent searching for kit. A well organised, well stocked area for tools, clamps, etc, will pay dividends.

Bladey.

 

[bikswahla]

Do the 5S in your area you will find lots of loop holes that you can cover to reduce the setup time

 

[tripleZ]

5S may help if the plant area is somewhat cluttered. If you have a fairly clean & organized facility like we do, then the gains aren't necessarily quite as noticeable.

An idea we've tossed around:
- Draw a circle around your press (# of feet depends on size of press). Monitor how often your setter leaves that circle. Each time he leaves you're experiencing downtime.
- Analyze why the person leaves. It could be calls for adjustment, to get tooling that wasn't staged properly, etc. You can start breaking down the process from here.
- Gear your solutions to keep the setter within that circle as much as possible. You may have to stage tools differently, buy more inspection equipment, etc.

After this you'll end up falling into questions about maintaining setup records, frequency of adjustments. Don't be surprised if the setup reduction project opens a whole slew of other projects to work on. But with a little focus on efficiency, you should see a big gain. Our last mini-reduction event pulled about 40% of the time from the setup using some of the techniques above in additional to exchangeable diesets.