Page 1 - Hemlock achieve 10 minute changeover for parts with the Feedio from Whitehouse Machine Tools

HEMLOCK ENGINEERING
CASE STUDY
AUTOMATION RAISES MACHINING CENTRE PRODUCTIVITY 5-FOLD
Robotic component loading and unloading is helping prismatic components subcontractor Hemlock Engineering, Stapleford, to unleash the true productivity potential of its latest Brother 5-axis, 30-taper Speedio M200X3 vertical-spindle machining centre (VMC). The result has been a 500 percent increase in production output compared with manually-loaded machines on-site.
“Typically, one of our 40-taper VMCs runs for 40 hours per week. However, a lot of the time the relatively slow spindle is not cutting – I estimate we get on average 45 percent utilisation.
With the robotic Feedio load / unload system serving the latest Brother, we achieve 100 hours operation per week, sometimes more, and the uptime of the faster 30-taper spindle is 88 percent.
The remarkable aspect of this automation success story is that it has been achieved in the most problematic of scenarios, i.e. the production of relatively small batches of components between 1,000- and 2,000-off requiring
short cutting cycles of between two and 10 minutes, a combination that necessitates frequent changeover of the production cell.
Hemlock’s owner Paul Cobb had exact figures to hand. He said,