By Bill Lisy
President
Thomas Conveyor & Equipment Co.
Recently, Thomas Conveyor & Equipment was approached with a unique conveyor application. The customer, a major supplier of automobile fasteners, was challenged with cutting cost without jeopardizing quality. The obvious solution was to decrease labor costs directly associated with the manufacturing process.
The parts were being stamped in thirteen cells, and each cell contained a high-speed four slide CNC machine. The CNC machines ran at a rate of one hundred parts per minute. The customer was accumulating the parts in totes that were placed on the floor at the discharge chute of each of the CNC machines. When a tote became filled with parts, the operators would empty the tote into a 55-gallon plastic drum. The plastic drums were located at the end of each line and when full were ready for shipping.
This process presented three problems. First, the weight of the tote was too heavy to safely lift. Second, the rate at which the totes needed to be emptied required four operators. A third problem was that the customer had limited floor space available for the conveyor.
TCE engineers went to work to come up with a conveyor designed to solve all three problems. The engineers choose our aluminum frame line of conveyors utilizing a 8” wide belt with 1” tall cleats on 6” centers. The conveyor incorporated a 20” long horizontal infeed section at a 13” infeed elevation with a three-sided flared hopper to contain the small parts.
The conveyor then transitioned into a 40” long conveyor section at a 60-degree angle of incline providing a discharge elevation of 50”. The steep angle minimized the floor space the conveyor occupied to 51” overall horizontal length. The conveyor was designed with a shaft mounted end drive wired to a variable speed frequency controller with cord and plug.
Thirteen conveyors arrived at the customer completely assembled and ready to run. Once in place the conveyors discharged parts directly into the 55-gallon shipping drum. This completely eliminated the labor required to manually dump each tote into the shipping drum.
Be sure to contact Thomas Conveyor & Equipment for all of your material handling needs. Call us today at 844-220-0086.