Engineers from Oldham-based CR Solutions worked with Steve Bell of kitchen worktop cutting company Symphony Group to develop a system to speed up cutting time in a fiercely competitive market.
Mitsubishi Electric supplied a servo motor and associated gearbox along with a programmeable logic controller (PLC), a touch screen human machine interface and Ethernet communications, and CR Solutions integrated the system and also supplied the mechanical linear slide.
The operating principle is based on the fact that virtually every kitchen layout is unique and typically requires three or four work surfaces, each of a specified length. This data is held electronically and used to re-programme the cut to length system between each cut, so providing a set of worktops for each new kitchen.
Mr Bell said Symphony Group’s old system had worn out after 10 years of hard graft in an arduous environment.
“Accuracy was to 0.1mm and we need to maintain or better that, but we wanted to increase from 600 units per day so that we had an edge over our competitors and targeted 1,000 units as the daily output.”
He said the new machine would allow the company to look at automating the material in-feed with a second PLC and added: “We’ll integrate the two controllers so that we have a closed loop manufacturing cycle and our productivity will increase further.”
