With a new order underway for a customer in Dubai following success in supplying distributors across Europe, GRP Tools, a specialist producer of glass-fibre applicators and ancillaries to the trade, is well on its way to making 1500 rollers a day.

The hand-roller applicators form the bulk of the Totton-based company’s business. From steel wire feedstock, roller wires are cut and bent into the required shape. Before automating the wire bending and handle assembly operation, several staff were employed on manual, single-operation, wire-bending and crimping activities.
To address the situation, managing director Peter Hussey turned to the technical solutions of Whitelegg Machines, which offered great flexibility in wire sizes and lengths, speed of operation and rapid changeover, including intuitive touch-screen control.
The selected machine, designated the PRL-8, is loaded with previously cut wires of appropriate length. A single wire is released into the nibbing station where two hydraulic units form the handle nib and a second nib as required. The pick and place unit then removes the wire, indexes the blank and loads it into the bending head. Here it is clamped and the head forms the bend nearest to the handle; it then indexes, retracting to position to form the second bend. At this point, the handle is clamped and the third bend is formed.
The formed component is then moved to the handle inserter where a plastic handle has been collected from the magazine by the handle pick and place. The handle inserter pushes the plastic handle on to the wire frame, which is then removed from and dropped into the unload chute; the cycle time being 5-7 seconds.
For further information www.whiteleggmachines.com

Combining the engineering expertise of company directors Ian Hazlehurst and Russ Canner, a new and expanding sheet metal subcontractor, Proform Group, has opened on the Wirral, Merseyside. With the assistance of a regional growth fund grant, Proform has invested over £2.5m in premises and machinery, creating 28 jobs in the process.

A turnover of £1.2m is expected in the first year of trading, which has been supported by a fibre laser cutting machine, two press brakes and a twin-head 3D waterjet cutting machine, all supplied by Bystronic UK.
The press braking function is the remit of an Xpert 250 tonne machine, capable of bending components up to 4.1 m long, and an Xpert 40, the supplier’s smallest model, of 40 tonnes/1 m capacity. Around half of the output from the laser cutting centre is folded on these two machines.
Hazlehurst states that an integral feature of the bigger CNC press brake is the large depth of the back-gauge, which maximises the range of parts that can be produced. He also appreciates the LED lights along the upper beam that show where the bending tools should be placed for any particular job, as well as the cameras at either side of the machine, verifying that the correct punch and die have been selected. The result of these safety measures is that damage to tooling is avoided and scrap is eliminated.
Regarding the Xpert 40, highlights are its user friendliness and speed when bending parts up to 1 m, particularly of the CNC back-gauge fingers. The 25 mm/s stroke is two and a half times faster than on the Xpert 250, while the tooling is interchangeable and power consumption is low.
For further information www.bystronic.co.uk

Installing a Universal Robot to pick metal parts from a press brake solved several automation headaches at Canada-based Etalex, a manufacturer of shelving systems that had no room for safety guarding in front of the press and needed a flexible user-friendly robot able to safely handle the pick and place tasks in a high-traffic area. The UR10 robot was up to the challenge.

When entering the 300,000 sq ft production hall at Etalex, the Universal Robot UR10 can be seen loading metal parts of various shapes and sizes to a large press brake. Compared with the other 25 robots in operation, all placed behind sturdy safety fencing, the Universal Robot application is an unusual sight. The UR robot belongs to a new breed of robots dubbed collaborative robots (‘cobots’) as their built-in force control limits the force at contact and does not cause bodily harm, enabling them to work alongside employees. Unlike more traditional industrial robots that normally stay bolted in one spot, the lightweight UR robots can also be quickly moved and reprogrammed for various production tasks.
“We needed a flexible automation solution that could be used for 10 different production cycles,” explains plant engineer Jean-Francois Rousseau. “Since I only have 6 ft of space in front of the press brake, it was important that I could run this application without safety caging around it.” Before the arrival of Etalex’s new robot colleague, an employee would manually tend to the press brake 8 hours a day. The manual tasks have now been reduced to an hour per day spent on inspecting the quality of each pallet and changing the coils, resulting in an estimated ROI of about 12 months.
For further information www.universal-robots.com