Like most producers, WCM struggled with these labor challenges, which restricted their manufacturing capability. Nevertheless, in 2020, welding grew to become the largest bottleneck within the firm’s operations. That’s when WCM realized it wanted to have a robotic welder.
“We had high quality points and we had manufacturing points. After which when our work started to double and even triple, [we realized] it could have taken 15 welders to do the work,” Hundley famous. “After we discovered in regards to the robotic laser idea, we may see that it may knock that labor requirement in half.”
This wasn’t WCM’s first expertise with laser welding or robotic welding. The corporate already had a robotic laser welder, however the provider didn’t present help to work by the implementation challenges.
Regardless of this, what drove WCM’s reassessment of laser welding was seeing how constant and exact laser welding will be versus TIG welding.
“Smaller diameter elements with thinner wall supplies had loads of warping with TIG due to the warmth,” stated Bryan Montez, plant supervisor at WCM.
Not solely did robotic laser welding show to be considerably quicker than handbook or robotic TIG, however it additionally enabled WCM to get rid of post-welding straightening of warped elements. Plus, robotic laser welding allowed the corporate to maximise the pace functionality of laser welding, in addition to management warmth enter and obtain precision welds past what a human may do.
Collaborative welding setup
With help from THG Automation, WCM applied robotic laser welding in a twin welding station to maximise productiveness from the robotic and their operators. Human-robot collaborative purposes can considerably enhance productiveness for high-mix, low-volume jobs. Right here, people carry out the hard-to-automate duties, corresponding to loading and unloading elements into fixtures, whereas robots weld them, making certain top quality and eliminating human error the place it issues probably the most.
