Knuckle Press Assembly
Background:
A recent client is a manufacturing company who does casting, machining and sub-assembly processes.
The Challenge:
Our client had a manual press cell that was pushing bushings in to a steering knuckle assembly. One of the problems with that was that some bushings wouldn’t be pressed to full depth. Another problem was that the operators were forgetting to put both halves of the bushing in to the knuckle.
Fixturing of the knuckle, in the nest tooling, needed to be poke yoked to make sure it was in the proper position before pressing the bushing.
The Journey:
Our client had been checking every 10 parts with a Go/NoGo gage for bushing height and overall dimension, but had no way of tracking and verifying each part.
The Solution:
Edgewater Automation designed and built a 3 station press cell and tracking verification within the cell to track the press forces to ensure the bushing were fully pressed on all the bushing. Edgewater put sensors in to poke yoke all components to know that the press would not cycle until all the parts were properly placed and present. Pass/Fail data is generated through force and travel criteria produced by press curve and transducer feed back.
Once the right force was achieved, an accept screen would come up and say it was ok to move the knuckle to the next station. This process was repeated; press A to B to C.
Benefits:
Edgwater’s 3 station press cell and tracking verification machine saved our client a lot of re-work and provided them a lot of data collection, because it tracks each part.
