May 2024 Volume 6

AUTOMATION

Forging Automation: Look How Far We Have Come By Jim Morris

Photo courtesy of Adaptec

As I sit here struggling with writer’s block, I think back to the first hot forging project my company tackled in 1997. It was an automotive part and there is an excellent chance your internal combustion engine had four, six or eight of these parts. The customer was using auto mation, but it was slow, and they struggled with reliability. We were asked to improve the process and we succeeded. We used an electric robot that replaced the hydraulic actuators incorporated into the old automation. Cycle time per part dropped substantially resulting in a production increase of about 40%. Reliability soared. Downstream part cleanup costs dropped as well since we could move the part from furnace to die much faster reducing scale buildup. Safety for the operators was improved as well since they no longer had to deal with hydraulic leaks and slippery floors. The success of the first installation quickly spread to other lines and sister plants. We followed the manufacturing processes upstream

and downstream from the forge and ended up with years’ worth of integration work. But the common theme was high volume and low mix. Most jobs had less than ten part numbers and all of them were of the same part geometry. Many of these jobs did not require a tooling change on the automation. With our newfound expertise in the forging industry, we approached many job shop forgers and never really got much traction. We heard “you don’t understand our process,” “we have too much variability in our setups,” “our lot sizes are too small to automate,” etc. All these concerns were true, and most were manageable with some engi neering effort, but most shops did not make the decision to auto mate. Getting labor was much easier and the work force was much younger. Robots at the time had a bad rap-they were stealing jobs, were not reliable, too hard to program, etc. Now let us jump forward to 2010. Robots were clearly here to stay

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