Friday, September 11, 2020
PAN + ARMBRUSTER have recently implemented the HOMAG SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec robot saw, meaning that production is now able to continue for hours even after the working day has ended. Thanks to the robot saw, the company has just taken a huge step forward with cutting in terms of this plan. The dividing cell has been installed in the production hall at the Oberkirch site since mid-2019 – over a surface area of 10 x 10 meters as a direct extension of an automatic HOMAG storage system that was installed some time ago. The advantage of this combination of technology is that as part of the new installation, the storage could be perfectly aligned to the new robot saw. “The hardware and software were seamlessly compatible with each other,” explains Armbruster happily, “there were no major integration or interface problems”, remarks, Matthias Armbruster, owner and managing director at PAN+ARMBRUSTER GmbH. This is especially true as the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec replaced a classic HOMAG pressure beam saw.
For PAN-ARMBRUSTER, it was almost certain that the solution would come from the HOMAG Group from the very beginning. “We’ve been working with HOMAG machines for many years now and we are very happy with them,” says Armbruster. The most important stations of the modernized cutting line: The storage facility transports the panels to a feed-stacking table. Here, the robot picks up the material and feeds it to the saw – according to the cutting pattern and continually realigning until all parts are finished. The labeling process is carried out by an automatic label printer on the saw. The robot then destacks the parts to pallets in stable, individually optimized stacks – for subsequent processing or on an order basis for instance. At PAN + ARMBRUSTER the robot has access to four destacking tables. “In terms of the configuration of the destacking tables, the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec is very flexible – both in terms of the number of tables as well as how the tables are spread out in the space available,” explains Armbruster, emphasizing, “This meant that we didn’t have to make any major modifications to the hall.” The installation and the commissioning of the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec therefore took just four weeks.
“Our new robot saw continues to run for up to two and a half hours without any need for human intervention. This releases valuable employee capacities,” says Armbruster, emphasizing that, “These capacities of our skilled workers are more urgently needed for more demanding tasks that can’t be automated.”
Even the waste disposal is automatic. With the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec, rough chips and cutting waste fall through a waste flap and are fed to a disk wheel shredder.
Automation is the key. Therefore, at PAN + ARMBRUSTER, the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec tends to run in robot mode – approximately 70 percent of the time. But the other 30 percent of the time is no less important to the company. In conclusion, Armbruster explains: “The robot saw has shortened our throughfeed times by around 30 percent — but with no loss of quality in the cutting…Our decision to buy the SAWTEQ B-300 flexTec was absolutely the right one. I would make the same decision again in a heartbeat.”
Tags: Automation, flextec, homag, Matthias Armbruster, PAN-ARMBRUSTER, Robot saw, sawteq, SAWTEQ B-300
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