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Multicyl workcell improves material handling at Arrow |
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 Switching from a conventional punch press to a Multicyl air over oil workcell has enabled Arrow Sheet Metal Ltd. Scarborough, ON to realize a number of benefits.
For one thing, “Installing the Multicyl workcell has allowed us to drop our price to the customer by approximately 20% on this part,” says Gary Gosse, president of Arrow Sheet Metal.
Arrow, which began operations in 1969, has 20 employees at its 15,000 sq. ft. facility.
The firm is a sheet metal job shop that serves a variety of markets including the heating industry, the electrical distribution market, and the pulp and paper sector.
According to Gosse, essentially all of Arrow’s sales are into the domestic market.
Typically, the company is working with aluminized sheet metal ranging in thickness from 20 ga to 10 ga. Arrow’s part runs range from one-offs and prototypes up to 30,000 pieces.
A problem faced by manufacturing companies of all sizes is that large components create material handling challenges. In Arrow’s case, the part that was causing a problem was a reflector for an infrared heating system. The piece part is 10 ft. in length.
Originally, with order quantities in the low/medium volume range, two adjacent press brakes were used to punch first one end, rotate the completed skid of parts and then punch the other end.
For bending, the punched parts were then moved to the next press brake. A tow motor (and operator) was used for the material handling process between press operations.
The problem that this created for Arrow was that they needed to free up expensive press time.
“The problem was that it was tying up our power brake and ultimately meant another handling,” he says.
The solution was to create a smaller, more portable and versatile workcell, which would require less space in a busy custom sheet metal shop. Arrow approached Multicyl Inc., Bolton, ON for a solution.
The solution developed by Multicyl was a two-step approach. The first step was to create an air/oil punch station to punch one end only.
The unitized tools were mounted in a 24 in. wide dieset in a pillar style cage. As the hole sizes were relatively small, a single acting 7 1/2 ton Multicyl was used to power the tooling.
This dedicated punching cell was situated in front of the bending machine thus freeing up the adjacent press brake.
This first step brought some improvement to Arrow’s production, but there were still two more punching operations to address.
In addition, the piece part had to be rotated using a forklift in order to be punched on both ends. However, given the length of the part, this presented safety problems.
The use of a forklift in a restricted shop space was hazardous to surrounding operations and costly to operate.
“Because it was previously being done on different machines, we would have to punch the part on one machine and then take it to a second machine to bend the part. There was a lot of part handling. Now, we just park the skid of parts in front of one machine and punch and bend the parts all at the same time,” explains Gosse.
The need for this process was eventually eliminated when a second punching station was added to complete the part inline prior to bending.
Combining punching and bending in one workcell resulted in the reflectors now being made in half the time compared to the previous methods, with the added benefit that the workcell may be removed and stored until the next job comes along.
“Basically, with the Multicyl workcell, we are now doing two operations with one handling,” says Gosse.
Multicyl air over oil systems create a logical alternative to the conventional press, especially in low tonnage applications or where a large press is used for small operations.
Small size and portability allows low cost workcells to be created by combining many operations in one location.
multicyl.com |
