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Metal fabricator improves productivity, quality, and safety with automated deburring

Metal fabricator improves productivity, quality, and safety  with automated deburring

The EdgeBreaker 4400 can deburr parts between 0.03 and 3.94 in. thick.

Situation

O’Neal Mfg. Services (OMS), an O’Neal Industries affiliate company, is a supplier of fabricated metal components and welded assemblies. Based in Birmingham, Ala., the company comprises seven additional North American locations, including Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Monterrey.

Besides a base package of equipment, some facilities offer specialty machinery for plate fabrication and contract metal manufacturing. OMS is a supplier for OEMs of elevators and stairways, trucks and trailers, and agricultural machinery, among others. A large percentage of its products are safety-critical.

The company’s manufacturing technologies include laser, plasma, and oxyfuel cutting; machining; and welding. And until recently OMS had a team of workers who performed manual grinding to remove burrs from freshly cut parts.

“We used to employ four to five people in the grinding area. In order to get the job done, as many as eight people worked in three shifts,” said Daniel Webster, engineering manager at OMS. This posed a challenge for OMS: Indiana is one of the top manufacturing states in the U.S. with very low unemployment, so the pool of available workers was minuscule. Additionally, OMS had to cope with a high staff turnover, as the tedious task was a strain for many workers. As a result, parts began to pile up, turning the grinding process into a bottleneck for the whole production.

But these were not the only bumps in the metal processing road. Manual deburring also involved safety risks, such as flying metal chips or broken grinding discs. Again and again OMS counted a serious number of close calls. “The process itself incurs a risk of injuries by default. However, we want to ensure the safest possible working conditions for our employees,” Webster explained. Faced with a shortage of staff, piled-up parts, and safety risks, OMS decided to automate the deburring process.

Resolution

Webster and his colleagues began analyzing the performance of deburring machines from ARKU. What finally tipped the scale was that OMS could run tests on the EdgeBreaker® under real production circumstances rather than having to base the decision on performance figures.

OMS chose the EdgeBreaker 4400, with the capacity for double-sided deburring of parts from 0.03 to 3.94 in. thick. This allows OMS to use it for a variety of products from agricultural to construction equipment parts.

At the time of installation in October 2018, the deburring operation was almost two weeks behind the planned schedule, thwarting the entire production process. With the new machine, however, the fabricator worked off its overflow within a week and caught up with the production schedule.

In the days of manual deburring, workers had to hand-grind the parts during three full shifts. Today the deburring machine is under operation for 1.5 shifts per day, achieving much higher output within half the time.

In addition, the quality of the parts has improved. With manual grinding, results differed from employee to employee. “One worker would always round the edges a bit more than the next,” Webster explained. This led to a certain amount of scrap at the end of each shift. The deburring machine delivers parts with repeatable quality and no scrap.

Metal fabricator improves productivity, quality, and safety  with automated deburring

The machine delivers parts without burrs and slag, but with repeatable quality.

When manual processes are automated, employees often feel uneasy about the future of their jobs. But with automated deburring, the steel manufacturer was able to expand its processing capacity while providing workers with more time for other duties. The machine has helped boost production processes and increase output while making the job significantly safer for staff.

ARKU Inc.