pesmedia.com Production Engineering Solutions June 2024 27 HONING & DEEP HOLE DRILLING Subcon Drilling Ltd Unit 6, The Heron Business Park, Eastman Way, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP2 7FW Tel: 01442 205960 www.subcondrilling.co.uk Email: U\[email protected] Subcon Drilling Limited Subcon Drilling Gundrilling - Honing - CNC Machining - Superfinishing SubconDrillingLtd SSG_fp.indd 1 20/10/2021 15:27 Superfinishing Subcon Drilling Limited is a highly professional company whose entire experience and energy is focused solely on Gundrilling, Deep Hole Drilling, Honing, CNC Machining, Superfinishing and 5 Axis Milling. With the knowledge and extensive experience of over 30 years, Subcon Drilling continually provides a professional and personal approach with total dedication to quality to a list of long serving clients. Our BS EN ISO9001:2015 Quality Management System is an integral part of our business. Focused on quality, Subcon Drilling is recognised as the leading Gundrilling and machining provider in the UK, specialist m meeting and exceeding our continually demands. customer’s d Subcon_Drilling_SSG24.indd 1 15/11/2023 14:28 Most automatic machine tool tending systems involve standard, plug-and-play equipment for robotically loading and unloading CNC lathes and machining centres for turning and milling. In an unusual application, Dutch firm Halter CNC Automation has supplied a special variant of its LoadAssistant robot cells that allows deep hole drilling to be similarly automated. The advantages of the installation at Ott-Jakob Spanntechnik in Lengenwang, Germany, are described by the sales agent for Halter in England, Wales and Scotland, 1st Machine Tool Accessories. The company advises that it is able to supply such special solutions in addition to the principal’s standard range of automated machine tending cells. Ott-Jakob Spanntechnik is a manufacturer of manual and automatic tool clamping systems for machine tool spindles. Materials processed in its 7,000m² factory are mainly high-alloy steel, and to a lesser extent aluminium and nonferrous metals. Series production team leader Florian Hartmann comments: “Four-fifths of our 2-axis lathes are equipped with bar magazines and we are always looking for opportunities to automate other machines on our shopfloor.” This policy has been extended to a TBT ML250 deep hole drilling machine that produces the holes via which coolant will subsequently flow through the spindle. The dimensions of workpieces processed on the machine vary widely. Shafts are mainly from 20mm to 50mm in diameter and between 75mm and 550mm long and almost any combination of these dimensions is possible. Until recently, the machine was used in twoshift production where one employee, who was also busy in other areas of the factory, manually loaded the TBT ML250 with raw parts and removed the finished shafts. With cycle times ranging from three minutes to about half an hour, depending on the size of the workpiece, the operator needed to be more or less permanently in attendance, hence the desire to automate the machine. Mr Hartmann continues: “We have been using standard LoadAssistant robot cells from Halter, a Universal Compact 12 and a Universal Premium 35, to feed a pair of CNC lathes for some time. “We continue to have a positive experience with these systems, so we asked the company for a solution to automate loading and unloading of our deep hole drilling centre. This resulted in the supply of a LoadAssistant Universal Premium 35 having special features in terms of the design and flexibility of the cell, allowing not one but four parts at a time to be loaded into the machine.” Programming of all movements and thus the entire robot kinematics has been modified and a workpiece storage system has been installed on the left-hand side of the machine at the front. The robot arm is equipped with a double-sided end effector with workpiece-specific gripper fingers that are adapted to the Adding automated loading for deep hole drilling Since March 2023, Ott-Jakob Spanntechnik in Germany, has been using a specially adapted Halter LoadAssistant and robot with 35kg capacity for loading a TBT deep hole drilling machine The robot has a double-sided end effector with workpiece-specific gripper fingers adapted to the shaft diameters that are handled
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