Usually my work involves designing and building new equipment, or occasionally completely rebuilding and upgrading old machines. Last week I got an emergency call from an existing customer that their production line was down and they couldn’t get help quickly …
As I prepare for a trip to Japan and China, I am reminded of the many machine start-ups I have participated in over the past twenty years or so. One of the things I used to enjoy about project work …
After spending the last several months working on some of my entrepreneurial ideas and teaching PLC programming classes, I just spent the last couple of weeks contracting on a machine and system startup/debug job. I feel very fortunate to have …
Not long after starting the original Automation Consulting in 1996 I met a machine builder in Knoxville who taught me a great deal about machine building. When we started working together there were only a few of us and sometimes …
The system I am currently working on is a machine that packages small plastic components. It consists of a number of hoppers with linear vibratory feeders that convey the parts into a mechanism that weighs the parts and feeds them …
After spending the last four or five months finishing the book and working on my new company website I have taken a short job doing debug and startup on some machinery. The picture above is from a machine I worked …
The first thing a lot of engineers and technicians do when trying to isolate a problem on an automated machine is go get their laptop and use programming software to see where the issue might lie. In some cases this …
