Page 38 - Metalforming Magazine April 2022

Automate the
Automate the
Pressroom
Pressroom
with No Upfront Cost?
with No Upfront Cost?
“Sign me up for that,” says Jose Figueroa, plant manager at Chicago’s Polar Manufacturing, an OEM of heavy-duty truck hardware. Polar now enjoys the benefits of two cobot-tended operations—a stamping press and a spot- welding machine—both financed by a third party to which it pays an hourly fee. Call it Robotics as a Service.
For Polar’s press-tending cobot setup, Formic paired a Universal Robots UR5e cobot with grippers, a touchscreen HMI, wheels for mobility and an input maga- zine to position sheet metal blanks for the cobot to then deliver to the press.
didn’t automate, we would not be able to remain in business,” Figueroa con- tinues. “We have implemented lean manufacturing principles and found other ways to improve productivity, but with small returns. After looking at automation solutions at FABTECH and other tradeshows, cobot arms real- ly looked promising, so we educated ourselves and finally decided to give it a try. We had no real consistency among our presses and operators; jobs ran at different production rates from press to press and among different operators. We felt that cobots tending the presses might improve throughput and production consistency.”
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Polar Hardware Manufacturing Co., established more than 100 years ago in Chicago, IL, fabri- cates a broad range of door and truck body hardware—think heavy-duty cam locks and latches, truck-trailer hinges, handles, and rope rings, for example. It’s a broad product set, but Polar’s experience and stable of machines
make that breadth of production pos- sible. However, until recently the firm had no automation deployed on its plant floor, “due to cost,” says plant manager Jose Figueroa. “We simply couldn’t justify the investment needed to automate with robotics.
“A few years ago, our attitude changed, and we really felt that if we
36 MetalForming/April 2022
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