Welding and Labour Improvements

Every single day at Lean Machine we work hard to make our customer's parts look better.  Also, we need to continually drive down our internal labour costs.  Our favorite type of part to improve and automate are the repetitive ones.  Every time we are able to automate a process we can re-purpose an employee's position to do something more interesting or increase our capacity.  Below you will find a video of robotic welding on aluminum landing gear as well as some before and after pictures of manual versus robotic processes.

A manual weld on a large arc between 3/8` and 1/8`aluminum plate.  This is a great example of a solid manual aluminum weld using Fronius welding equipment.  This weld is challenging because the employee has to re-position themselves several times to make sure the correct torch angle is achieved as they move around the arc to ensure the shielding gas is protecting the leading edge of the weld pool.

Here is the after picture of the same parts welded together but using an automated robotic welding cell.  The weld has a bit more shine to it mostly due to the perfect torch angle being achieved by the robot`s perfect welding program made directly out of our CAD models.  The weld bead size is also perfect every time.