Millomat Stampings Inc. has been no stranger to manufacturing flexibility for the past 20 years, writes Lincoln Brunner.
The Mississauga, Ont.-based shop offers tool and die work, as well as a bevy of other services including tube fabrication, welding, and polishing and grinding. Its main driver, though, is sheet metal fabrication, serving the food service equipment and construction industries.
And the investment of four fully automated press brakes over the past few years has changed the way the shop operates.
“We pretty much have this thing down pat,” says CEO Mani Sehmbi. “My guys on the floor are really utilizing the robot a lot, like 99.9% of the time."
The fourth, R-Brake 130T from SafanDarley North America, LLC, can load tooling as well as scan, pick up, reposition, bend, pack, and stack parts autonomously.
“We’ve had a unique kind of approach where we said, ‘No, let’s put a robot on a machine but make that robot [moveable], off to the side,’” says Kyle Zellmann of SafanDarley. “The machine is still fully usable as a manual machine. Then at night when you leave, you close the gates, you put material in it, and it runs as a robotic cell.”
#metalforming #pressbrake #automation #robotics #sheetmetal #fabrication #metalmanufacturing