FEATURE ON PRESSES AND COIL HANDLING

Another member for MiM

Pressmark Pressings has joined the manufacturing and engineering membership group, Made in the Midlands (MIM).

The company, which provides high-volume components for automotive manufacturers, is looking to boost sales and share best practice by working closer with the collective group of 400+ firms, which includes the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, ZF, GKN, Dennis Eagle, Moog Aircraft Group and the Liberty Group.
The decision to take membership is part of an ambitious growth strategy that will see the businesses work towards £10m of annual sales, a 33% increase since the current management team completed
an MBI just over 12 months ago.
“Like many other fellow members, we have joined Made in the Midlands to win new business, collaborate, raise our profile and source Midlands-based suppliers,” explains John Nollett, chief executive of Pressmark Pressings. “We join an industry network of ‘movers and makers’ which is proactively bringing together the region’s engineering talent to challenge the status quo that UK manufacturing is on the retreat. It is quite the opposite, with the last 12 months seeing a further resurgence in domestic output and increasing interest in our ability to design, add value and innovate.
“The Midlands is the heartbeat of UK industry and we should do everything we can to attract trade and investment to the area, as we look to provide sustainable growth and new jobs,” he adds.
On its current site in Atherstone, the firm has 26 large bed presses, ranging from 150 to 1200 tonnes, allowing for the manufacture of different size products in both standard metals and exotic alloys.
For further information www.pressmark.co.uk

Major project for construction fastenings

Atkin Automation, a UK designer and manufacturer of press-feed and coil equipment, has won a six-figure contract with a major UK supplier of construction fastenings.

The company designed and manufactured an Atkin twin-strip press-feed line, which will effectively double the customer’s production capacity for one of its main products. Atkin says that the new line enables two strips of steel instead of one to be processed simultaneously, while also allowing multiple coils to be loaded on to one mandrel to further improve efficiency by reducing changeover times.
Geoff Barker, sales manager for Atkin, says: “This project is a great example of our complete service from design to commissioning of a twin-strip press-feed line. We have over 70 years’ of history within our business of producing machines like this and the new line will bring major benefits in terms of increased efficiency and productivity for the customer.”
The company, originally WT Atkin, specialises in coil-processing equipment and has a long history of serving both UK and international markets, ranging from automotive and white goods to building products.
Atkin Automation is part of Group Rhodes, a manufacturer of capital equipment for the clay-working, metal-forming and materials-handling industries. Within Group Rhodes there are a number of businesses which provide original equipment manufacture and aftermarket services for different sectors, including Rhodes Interform, Hallamshire Engineering Services and Craven Fawcett.
For further information www.grouprhodes.co.uk

Press line equipped with robots

Martinrea has set a clear goal for itself: to be the world’s best auto-parts supplier.

To achieve its objective, the company and employer of roughly 15,000 people decided to equip its first large-scale press line in Mexico (at its facility in Silao) with a blank loader and multiple Crossbar Robot 4.0 units from Schuler, thereby gaining the ability to provide its customers with maximum flexibility.
The blank loader is suitable for outer skin parts. Here, the new optical line scanner from Schuler detects the precise position of the blanks before they are loaded into the first press. A Crossbar Robot then corrects the position as needed.
The Crossbar Robots 4.0 are the centrepiece of Martinrea’s press line in Silao. They transport parts directly from one press station to the next, and can accurately position the components for any die. Especially where multi-part components are produced, this flexibility delivers an important advantage.
Since the Crossbar Robot is hung on a track, it can cover distances of up to 12 m between press stations. Distances this large are mainly found on older lines, where space was provided for an unloading or turning station. This configuration means that the new Crossbar Robot can replace loading feeders, unloading feeders and part orientation stations in the gap between presses.
The Crossbar Robot is based on a six-axis industrial robot that was expanded by Schuler to include two additional axes: one for the hand of the robot arm and one for the horizontal drive. This enhancement significantly increases the robot’s range of motion, flexibility and output.
For further information www.schulergroup.com

RSD presses forward with £750,000 contract haul

Investment in a new machine from Worcester Presses is helping a Cannock automotive supplier win over £750,000 of new contracts.

RSD Pressings, which supplies components for seats, sub-frames, cross car beams, bumpers and bodies, has installed a new GTX300 Chin Fong progression press and can now take on much bigger parts for tier-one customers and major car manufacturers.
Nearly £350,000 has been spent on the machine and a Tomac TLN4 coil line, with more than £100,000 of funding secured from Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Grants 4 Growth, and the European Regional Development Fund. Three new jobs have already been created as a result of the investment and a further eight will be recruited over the course of the next 12 months once production starts on the projects already secured.
“The components we manufacture at our new facility in Cannock end up in millions of cars all over the world, including Aston Martin, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Volvo,” explains operations director Daniel Burton.
“Worcester Presses came in, looked at our requirements and then developed a turnkey solution that involved the GTX 300, the latest HMI touch screen control and new Tomac TLN4 coil line which will increase our progression and coil feeding capabilities,” he adds. “This machine has doubled our bed size and already led to several new orders that we wouldn’t have been able to take on previously. There is still lots of capacity on it too, which means we are looking for even more new work.”
For further information www.worcesterpresses.co.uk

Combined services for North America

Staufen and Schuler are now offering their combined services in North America. The international specialists work as a single team to provide consulting services and process optimisation for press shops across the USA and Canada.

Process improvement experts from Staufen, together with their counterparts from Schuler, analyse all press shop processes in order to maximise added value. Based on a so-called ‘Quick Check’, untapped potential is identified and leveraged. Then, Staufen consultants and Schuler experts work together to improve the whole value stream of the press shop. Focus topics are process optimisations (such as OEE improvements), die-change optimisation and the implementation of TPM, as well as set-up time and output and logistics optimisations.
With this co-operation, Staufen and Schuler have already analysed many press shops at different customers all over the world. They discovered that the equipment utilisation rate was less than 50% in some cases. The main reasons were wrong or poorly dimensioned tooling, long change-over times, poor system set-ups or bad material feeding.
Based on the specific customer’s results, an individual action plan was developed and its implementation started. Thus, KPIs like OEE, productivity and efficiency were improved significantly.
For further information www.schulergroup.com