How to realize low-cost automation of CNC lathe processing?
The price of labor has risen sharply, and the professionalism of front-line operators cannot be compared with that of ten years ago. This means that the "demographic dividend" of China's manufacturing industry is disappearing. Labor shortage and how to free people from simple and tedious repetitive labor are two major problems facing the current manufacturing industry. Upgrading traditional industries with modern and automated equipment, promoting technological dividends instead of demographic dividends, has become the inevitable choice for the optimization and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry and sustained economic growth. Intelligent automated manufacturing with "machine substitution" as the core has gradually become the choice of enterprises .
Although automation is good, many automation solutions are expensive and maintenance costs are also high. For example, a car body welding automated production line, 6 welding manipulators, cost 14 million, project integration implementation cost 1.5 million, and annual maintenance cost 700,000.
Are there any automation solutions that can be affordable for small and medium-sized enterprises? The answer is yes, that is, low-cost automation that has been advocated in lean production. CNC lathe processing is a very common processing procedure in manufacturing factories. Today, we will discuss the low-cost automation of CNC lathe processing.
Although CNC lathes are modern equipment with a high degree of automation, it is still difficult to recruit workers for operating positions. The reason is that the cutting motion of the workpiece that directly creates value has been completely completed by the machine tool, and most of the CNC programming is undertaken by the process department or the workshop-level technical department. The work of the CNC lathe operator is only the simple feeding and receiving work. To some extent, this kind of tedious work is a devastation to people's intelligence. In the current labor shortage, it has been difficult to attract young people with dreams. This is also the root cause of the shortage of CNC lathe operators. .
Equipping with automatic feeding and automatic receiving systems on CNC lathes is a way to increase the degree of automation of the machine tool, which can immediately solve the problem of difficult recruitment of operators. The reason why some factories did not implement automation was that their product profits were low and could not support the huge investment in the implementation of automation, or the factories lacked management and implementation talents for automation. Does CNC lathe automation necessarily require huge investment and management costs? Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to achieve low-cost automation by analyzing specific conditions and implementing automation according to local conditions and tailor-made.
The automatic feeding of CNC lathes is relatively simple. One cylinder, one hopper, and one conveyor belt can complete all the actions. This article will not introduce in detail. However, the automatic feeding of CNC lathes is very complicated, and different blank materials have different feeding methods in shape, material, length, and weight. Laojin has done a feasibility study for the round steel parts with the largest number of users. According to the difference in the length of the blank material, the feeding method is divided into two categories: automatic feeding of long materials and automatic feeding of short materials.
The method of automatic feeding of long materials on CNC lathes can be divided into two types: push method and pull method. Pushing means that the pushing equipment is located outside the CNC lathe, and the long bar is pushed into the machine tool from the spindle through hole with thrust; the pulling device of the pulling finger is located in the machine tool, and the long bar is pulled in from the spindle through hole by pulling force machine tool. The push method has mature commercial equipment, such as a storage type long bar automatic feeder that can place multiple bars, a single tube oil bath type long bar feeder that can place a single bar, and a heavy hammer type long bar feeder The material feeder, after the manufacturer's commercial promotion, has a relatively high awareness in the factory and has a wide range of applications. The input of the pull method is very small. Because of the low commercial value, there are few people who research and promote it. However, the use effect of the automatic feeding device of the pull method is no less than that of the feeder of the push method, with less investment and quick results. It is very worthy of promotion in the factory.