Pre-Packaged Turning Automation Beats Quality Bottleneck

In just four weeks, Amada Wasino delivered three two-machine turning cells to Linamar of Toronto, Canada. Each fully automated cell, comprising two G7F gang-style turning centers with in-process gaging, was pre-engineered and ready for production when it hit the customer’s floor. The cells automated a manual process at Linamar in an exceptionally short time and solved a quality problem that had hindered production.

The workpieces are air conditioning front housings, machined to a tolerance of +/-0.007mm at 1.67 Cpk. The cast-iron parts are turned and bored on the first side, flipped and then transferred to a second machine, where they’re turned on the second side. Linamar had been machining the parts on manually loaded twin-spindle machines. Scrap rates were high because the machines were only marginally capable of holding tolerances within the tight process-control envelope. In contrast, the Amada Wasino’s G- Series machines are extremely accurate and capable of holding tight tolerances in production, demonstrating their accuracy and repeatability in thousands of applications. In runoffs for Linamar’s application, the two-axis gang-style turning centers held +/-0.002mm at 1.67 Cpk, substantially exceeding accuracy requirements.

The machines’ inherently rigid design lends itself well to machining long runs of parts at tight tolerances. Their gang tooling eliminates turret overhang; their X axis oil bath provides Critical thermal stability, greatly reducing ballscrew expansion; and their close-coupled box structure makes the machines exceptionally rigid in all axes of deflection.

No compromise on cycle times Linamar’s experience suggested the need for in-process gaging, which Amada Wasino often incorporates in its self-contained cells. Like the parts-flipper and the between-machine transfer unit, adding gaging was just a matter of bolting another module onto the in-line transfer system. The gaging calibrates each workpiece length and automatically feeds back an offset for it. Because Amada Wasino’s automation is fully programmable and designed to perform several tasks at once, the additional operation did not compromise cycle times. Seeking a solution to its scrap-rate problem, Linamar wound up with a completely automated process that replaces a manually loaded one. The move to self-contained, as opposed to custom-engineered, automatic loading and unloading simplified the setup and speeded deliver. As experience shows in G-Series applications throughout the world, it also improves system reliability and flexibility.