Technical Paper
Low Volume Automation, Challenges and Advantages
by Aaron Phipps, Technology Center Manager, VP of Sales & Marketing, MPI, Inc. T
his paper is the third and final in a three paper series discussing cost reduction through process
improvement in the wax room. My first two papers focused on two techniques to reduce scrap and rework during injection. Making these improvements and optimizations leads to the next logical step of process improvement which is automation.
Historically,
automation has been thought of as unachievable for the ‘job shop’ which runs lots of different jobs and short runs. The prevailing belief has been that only very high volume or very high value parts could be affordably automated. This paper will focus on the processes, advantages, and challenges of automation in the wax room for the Job Shop. The challenge that set out by the
customer was to automate their parts cost effectively without making costly changes to their process.
Being a job
shop, Lamothermic is given tools by their customers for short runs with little to no minimum guarantee other than the initial PO.
The ‘job shop’
atmosphere is commonly believed to be a barrier to entry into automation since the prevailing belief is that you cannot automate low volume, high changeover work. We worked with the customer to develop a unique automation solution around some specific design constraints: • No major die modifications were allowed
• No major runner modifications were acceptable
• Short set up time on new jobs • Easy job changeover is a must We chose to focus on a few
representative parts to prove out our concept.
number of challenges.
There were, of course, a Automation
requires repeatability, which requires consistency in a process and standards for evaluating a process. The challenges
26 ❘ January 2017 ®
Figure 01: Parts injection optimization taken from paper #2
Figure 1: Pour Ratio Gains
included: • There is no such thing as a standard runner in a foundry. Runners come in all shapes and sizes. Even small variations in length and geometry can be a real challenge when automating a process.
• Runners are treated with little respect or concern for their full or true cost to the process. Many
foundries do not spend any time or money to produce runners with the same quality as a pattern, nor do they accurately measure what it costs in time, money and rework to produce a runner.
• Patterns are often not similar or have no commonality
• Pattern gates and runners are mismatched, resulting in
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