A 5-axis with robot billet handing is enhancing accuracy, quality and repeatability on medical devices manufactured at Redhill contract manufacturer ATC.
The automatically loaded and unloaded production cell comprises a C 12 U 5-axis machining centre served by an RS 05-2 robotic billet handling system, was built by the German firm Hermle and supplied by sole UK sales and service agent Kingsbury.
Guy Lord, owner and managing director of ATC said, " 95% of our turnover is medical work and we also manufacture super-accurate bearing rings.
"Currently, 60% of our business is from companies that have previously tried another subcontractor, either in the UK, continental Europe or the US, and have been unable to obtain the quality they need."
The machine was bought to produce complex spinal implants machined to ultra-tight tolerances from tough cobalt-chrome, whose low thermal conductivity tends to wear tools quickly. Surface finish is also extremely high to meet the cosmetic requirements stipulated by the customer.
The contract initially covers a family of four different parts, with more to come, in cutting cycle times of approximately one hour. It takes just 30 minutes to change over between batches to make a different part, despite the complexity of the cell. Actually, the time to produce a first-off part, check it and very occasionally make adjustments has to be added to the set-up time.
The presence of the internal robot, temperature compensation within the C 12 U and integration of Blum tool wear monitoring with automatic sister tool change have allowed unattended production to continue day and night and throughout the weekend right from the start. It has lowered manufacturing cost-per-part and is delivering high levels of efficiency and consistency of output. A mix of different billets can be loaded into the cell on Friday night and the machine runs unattended throughout the weekend. Staff return on Monday morning to find a rack full of completed components ready for assembly or dispatch.
"The benefits of robotic billet handling over manual intervention are consistency of component quality and dependability of throughput, added to which the cell runs 24/7 virtually unattended, unlike those that depend on pallet exchange."
The plan is to take the automation a stage further within the next couple of years by integrating a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) into the cell so that each part manufactured is transferred to the metrology platform by the robot to have its critical dimensions checked. Offsets will be sent automatically to the machine control to keep components reliably within their tight tolerance limits.
Photo: Guy Lord, owner and managing director of ATC, in front of the new Hermle automated prismatic machining cell in Redhill.