<section>Customers are always hard to deal with, requiring better prices and higher quality. This is a fact of life in the foundry trade in 2012, it may always have been the case. Reducing cost in some highly developed areas of foundries such as melting, moulding, etc. may not be so easy. However, typically, one of the processes requiring a lot of expensive floor space is the fettling department.
Manual hand fettling department
Often fettling departments can be 15 M x 10M to accommodate 10 fettling bays. At commercial rates how much would this area cost to rent per year? In western europe a typical cost per square meter may cost nearly €70 per annum. So the "rent" for a medium size fettling department may be over €10,000 per year without taking into account equipping the department with benches, tools, pedestal and hand grinders and fitting extraction to each bay.
Very often there is a separate department for inspection, again at a cost.
PS Auto Grinding Limited, offers an automated grinding solution that;
- IS 2, 3, 4 OR 5 times faster than a manual grinder
- Produces repeatable quality to 0.1MM
- Isolates the grinder from the sparks, debris, noise, dust and crucially in 2012, the vibration.
It also does this in a very compact space. For a foundry producing a range of parts up to 20KG, Series 400 S´S dimensions are only 1.5M WIDE by 2.0M length.
One operator can replace 4, 6, 8 even up to 10 hand fettlers.
So two machines doing the same production of 10 hand fettlers would only require 6 square meters. Given a total area of 5 meters by 5 meters for stillages, work benches, as an example, then the foundry has reduced its space requirements by 125 square meters.Apart from practical benefits this could theoretically save €8750 per year or €175,000 over 20 year.
This is not far short of the cost of a new series 400, or an additional cost reduced to keep the foundry competitive.
Small in dimensions not in capability
Designed by a foundry corporation in Japan, Koyama, Series 400 and the larger 500 Series, for up to 200KG castings, 1.2M in diameter have several unique features that maximise the weight and size capabilities but keep the size of the machine compact, essential in fiercely competitive markets where every cost has to be managed, especially space.
The principles are simple;
- Short load bearing arms 400MM and 500MM in length, against standard 6 axis robots arms of 1.2M. Very flexible in getting a casting into the right position to grind and designed to be load bearing given the arduous task of grinding.
- Patented tiling wheel mechanism allowing 100% of most castings to be ground in one cycle in a very compact area.
- Direct servo motors enclosed in series 400 and series 500 arms reducing the need for auxiliary space required to store the motors.
Paul Smith, managing director of PS Auto Grinding Limited adds;
“Foundries are under pressure every day to reduce costs whilst improving quality, offer shorter delivery times and many pressures.
Addressing the issue of the huge space requirements that manual fettling demands along with better produtivity, quality and safety is helping PS Auto Grinding to continue to grow and prosper, helping foundries to reduce unneccesary cost."
PS Auto Grinding have recently installed or received orders for UK,Italy, Turkey, Russia, Portugal, Poland and Germany.
With intense, low cost, highly competive pressures from emerging economies the potion of doing nothing with the high cost, inefficient, fettling departments producing poor quality with poor safety records no longer applies.