This helps eliminate one of the most ubiquitous wastes in low-volume, high-product-mix fabrication: misinformation. At Makino Milling Machine, the milling machine maker, a large robot lifts and manipulates massive castings that are machined, cleaned, and transported to storage, all without a single fork truck driver or overhead crane operator. Material arrives in the milling department via automated guided vehicles, which follow magnetic tape on the floor.
A robotized milling cell processes more than 80 different motor mount bracket components. Figure 4 On the left, a custom tool, built and patented by Makino Co. Employees never manually load a tool into the magazine. Instead, they place it on a loader system that scans the QR code, after which a mechanized system places the tool in the magazine. Once the loader takes the tool, no operator needs to touch it again until the next sharpening.
In Makino started bringing in-house a portion of its sheet metal enclosure work—in particular, the challenging, hard-to-ship, cosmetically critical workpieces see Figure 7. Edges for the carbon steel sheets are pristine, and forming geometries are exact enough to be welded in a recently installed robotic fiber laser welding cell.
If the product has sufficient volume, a fixture is built, and the robot is programmed. Why laser weld? Speed is one reason, but not the only reason. The sheet metal operation had a few employees grinding welds joined by standard arc welding, but most if not all the fiber laser welded joints required no postweld processing.
The pieces flowed directly to coating and final assembly shortly thereafter. Tatsuaki Aiba, our Makino Milling Machine tour guide, then pointed to some of the workers in final assembly. Some were students, many others were women, including mothers returning to work a trend the Japanese government encourages to combat the chronic worker shortage.
He then pointed to the air conditioning vents that directed airflow upward and then downward over the assembly cells. That, too, was installed to instill a comfortable workday. Despite trade tensions, machine tool makers are bullish on the U. Coincidentally, during the press tour in late September, the U. In a press conference during the tour, Amada Holdings Co. That is why we are opening a factory in High Point.
Amada also purchased Marvel Mfg. Okamoto said that with this purchase, Amada will increase its North American band saw market share from 12 to 26 percent, selling machines under both the Amada and Marvel brand names. Thanks to the acquisition, Amada is expecting its North American band saw business to jump percent by Over the same period it expects its sheet metal cutting and bending equipment sales to grow by 19 percent.
Like in the U. Most shops have fewer than 50 employees. Driving these sales, Okamoto said, are two factors. Figure 5 Employees refer to a custom app to know what to work on next, read job notes from other employees, and pull up work instructions.
One is aging equipment. A lot of machines in Japan are ripe for a replacement. Yes, the machines seem to move slower than a team of operators could, manually shaking and breaking parts out of sheets. But the automated system never stops, and with the right program, it never makes a sorting and stacking mistake. Every sheet is presented downstream to the press brake or elsewhere the same way, in the same grain direction, and the same orientation.
In this environment, Amada Japan plans to expand its production capacity significantly within the next year. The sprawling Fujinomiya campus at the base of Mount Fuji is a busy place. For blanking, it has the capacity to produce up to machines a month, and in September the plant was averaging a little more than a month, or almost 1, machines a year see Figure 8. To meet increasing demand, the company plans to expand its existing manufacturing space next year.
That expansion is expected to increase production capacity by a third. Still, as the company expands, it has plans to help make each worker more productive by, among other things, refining its data collection.
Workers clock in and out of jobs so estimated times can be compared to actual production times. The goal is to better allocate resources and match each worker with his or her strengths.
Located in the middle of the Isehara campus and opened earlier this year, the museum is not just a small hall with old machines and static plaques. This nifty tool temporarily fastens multiple sheets of metal typically aluminum together before the pieces are permanently joined. Think of it as a stronger clothespin. Various angle grinder discs. This set can include grinding wheels, which can be superabrasives or conventional abrasives, depending on your projects; cutoff wheels; and flap discs, which are used for finishing; and wire wheels.
A throat-less shear. This tool is made for achieving straight, curved, or irregular cuts on a metal project. It has three holes for simple mounting and features a tall handle that gives you the leverage necessary to easily cut stainless or mild steel and aluminum.
Needless to say, this tool is an everyday staple in most fab workshops. Wire cutters. Every handyman should own a reliable pair of wire cutters for snipping frayed ends.
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