Robotic component loading and unloading is helping prismatic components subcontractor Hemlock Engineering of Stapleford to unleash the true productivity potential of its latest Brother five-axis, 30-taper Speedio M200X3 vertical machining centre. The result has been a 500% increase in production output compared with manually-loaded machines on-site.

The remarkable aspect of this automation success story is that it has been achieved in the most problematic of scenarios: the production of relatively small batches of components between 1000 and 2000-off requiring short cutting cycles of between two and 10 minutes.

Hemlock’s owner Paul Cobb says: “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% utilisation. With the robotic Feedio load/unload system serving the latest Brother, we achieve 100 hours of operation per week, sometimes more, and the uptime of the faster 30-taper spindle is 88%.

“On this basis, overall production output is about five times that of one of our 40-taper machines,” he continues. “Additionally, the latter capacity needs the full-time attendance of an operator whereas the Brother cell occupies an operator for only about 20% of their time. So there is a five-fold reduction in the labour cost content of components produced.”

He explained that the plug-and-play Speedio/Feedio cell costs about £800 per week to run, including finance, labour and power, which he said “is not very much”. It arrived on the shop floor in March 2022 and, as already observed, produces similar output to five 40-taper machines with full-time operators. That is why Cobb describes the benefits of his first ever automated prismatic component production cell as “absolutely astronomical” and “off the charts”.
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