A worldwide fabricator of manufactured stone products was having a serious issue with a molded sink they were manufacturing. They found they were unreliably able to produce the sinks with planed surfaces on the top and bottom of the bowls. The solution they came up with internally was to send out each sink they produced to a post-production planer to ensure the surfaces were plumb for their future installations. This came at an extremely high, seven-figure annual cost.
Unsatisfied with their current solution, the customer reached out to Cincinnati Automation via a web search about installing a laser gaging and vision inspection system to handle the product at the end of the production line and inspect it for correctly planed surfaces. Cincinnati Automation was able to create an addition to their line to move the product through inspection stations to verify or fail the surface measurements for each product. After a period of development, fabrication, and programming, Cincinnati Automation presented the final machine to the end customer. It was installed on their line, and within a short three months, the machine had paid for itself. It was able to reliably detect each incorrectly made sink and actually trace those sinks back to the molds they were being built in. It was discovered that two of the molds on site were out of spec and that was where the issues were stemming from. The customer was able to fix their molds and from then on were able to consistently monitor their production quality in real time. In addition to that, they were able to cut their post-production machining costs all the way down to next to nothing.
If you have a gaging or inspection application you need looked at, or any other type of molded product inspection system you would like to develop, contact Cincinnati Automation at 859-371-5070 or info@cincinnatiautomation.com.
