A custom-made sanding machine for a medium-sized sinks manufacturer
Thanks to its long experience in the sanding sector, Volpato is able to offer each customer targeted and customized solutions according to its specific needs and the type of processing to be carried out. Among the personalized machines recently realized, Volpato has taken care of the design and production of a tailor-made finishing machine for a medium-sized sinks manufacturer.
The customer in question works in Italy for a large brand of kitchens, which exports all over the world, and has a growing production. In general, the production of sinks starts from the cut sheet, which is then folded and welded. After automating the cutting, bending and welding steps with robots, he was looking for an effective solution to automate the finishing operation, which has now become a bottleneck in production managed entirely by manual operators.
The customer need
The customer needed to increase the level of automation in the company by delegating to the operators as few operations as possible, thus reducing production costs and time and achieving uniform finishes of the final products. The uniformity of finishing was a specific request of his client and being an operation previously handled manually, it was difficult to achieve in this way. The aim of the machine designed by Volpato was to switch from a finishing of the front of the sink where there were visible welding marks to the possibility of creating sinks with finished edges, homogeneous and without marks.
Volpato’s custom-made solution
Our team, highly trained and specialized in the field of sanding, first identified the type of machine that had previously been supplied to the customer for manual use. Having studied the needs of the customer and the actions normally carried out by the operators to obtain the best possible result, we studied together with the customer a finishing machine that reproduced the same movements in a repetitive way. Our specialized technicians then moved on to the design phase of a machine with two interpolated axes, which follows the same operations of the worker. Thanks to the use of a simple ISO programming language, the machine is able to focus first on the parts where it removes a greater amount of material, then by changing the tool, to efficiently and accurately uniform the whole surface.
In the construction phase the machine has become an automatic sanding center with three automatic axes in which the third axis is managed adaptively through special valves. The only action which requires human intervention has therefore become the loading of the piece to be treated into the machine and the unloading of the already perfectly finished workpiece.
Results and benefits obtained by the customer
Using this machine, specifically designed to meet the customer’s needs, the operators’ intervention in the finishing process has been limited to the unloading/loading of the final products. This has led to numerous advantages: an increase in the company production level, a significant reduction in waste as the finished parts are all uniformed and a reduction in costs and production times. In this way, the manufacturer has been able to better satisfy his customer, respecting in a precise way the requests and increasing his margin.
If you are looking for a custom-made sanding machine to optimize your production, contact us or request a customized quote. Our staff is always at your disposal to advise you on the most suitable solutions.