A new £150,000 lacquer spray finishing line has been installed by NEY at Hinckley-based bedroom furniture manufacturer Hammonds Furniture.
The £40m-turnover company is using a Superfici BravoRobot to lacquer Hammonds’ top-of-the-market ranges of bedroom furniture in oak and maple veneers. The machinery, which replaces a manual spraying operation, is designed to improve consistency and make the operation cleaner.
Factory manager Steve Hammonds said: ‘Handspray booths are notorious for attracting muck and rubbish and creating an unsound environment. Whereas hand work sprayers are fallible in terms of application weight and consistency, the new robotics are not.’
The investment has enabled the company to cut its spray shop work force from three to one and save up to 30 litres of cleaning material a day.
The conveyor that carries panel components through the spray zone is surrounded by a water filter extraction system which is pumped through a reservoir in which chemical additives bring solids to the surface of the water from which they can be skimmed off.
Work pieces loaded onto the infeed conveyor pass through a panel cleaning system and then a size reading scanner which transfers the data to the control panel for automatic programming of the spray head.
