In my previous life as a consultant I was able to experience a wide variety of vendors and automation platforms. There is a wide variety of choices available though you are often restricted by the specifications of the company you …
This is the loading station of a machine that was one of the last jobs I did with my small machine building company. It is a precision hydraulic press for torque converters. During the years of 2005-2006 we had acquired …
For the last twenty years or so I have worked in the controls, machine building and systems integration fields, generally involved with automation on some level. I understand the controls and machine building part, they are pretty self-explanatory and descriptive …
This is another application done with NAS from about 1998. We did a lot of vision, gauging and leak testing applications for Tennex, a Japanese cooperative venture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This company has since been bought by Mahle, a German …
This is a screen shot from a job I subcontracted for in about 2002 or so. A Kraft Life Savers plant was shut down in Michigan due to the US tariffs on sugar and moved to Montreal in Canada. This …
When I was on my own I often got requests quote the rebuild of old and obsolete equipment. There were various factors at work to make companies want to do this: inability to obtain spare parts due to discontinued components, …
I have spent the last few days working on a fairly elaborate safety system that involves linking and unlinking safety zones. Usually I have used on machine as a “master” and the the other a “slave” or sub-zone, but this …
This picture is from about 1999 when my small company was primarily a panel shop and controls integrator. At this time about half of our work came from NAS who built a lot of custom packaging equipment (they build mostly …
Poka-yoke is a Japanese term roughly translated to “mistake-proofing”. Techniques include the use of sensors to verify part location, orientation and quality, fixturing to ensure incorrect components can’t be installed, sequencing and detection of proper assembly steps by such techniques …
I was browsing through some old pictures of systems trying to get some inspiration for today’s post and ran across some pictures of the cotton classing system we helped put into the USDA facility in Memphis. This was a cooperative …
