There are doors for residential purposes and architectural doors that are much more difficult to produce than others. Doors that require even more complex drilling and routing because they need to comply with specific characteristics in terms of thickness, size and weight. This is even more so in the case of doors for the hospital or tourism-reception applications, to give just a few examples, that need to meet the technical standards set out in safety and fire prevention regulations, even achieving a size and weight above market standards.
Matters complicate further when we are talking about producing doors with machining work and profiles that also differ considerably one from the other. How is it possible to deal with all these problems while continuing to produce and deliver efficiently and rapidly?
Thanks to the decades of experience that SCM’s engineering team has in researching and developing customised and turnkey solutions, SCM offers a flexible integrated cell for drilling and routing special square doors, in excess of 120kg. The cell has already been adopted by state-of-the-art industry businesses, including the Norwegian company, Nordic Door, a market leader across the whole of northern Europe.
Key advantages
The key advantages of the cell set-up are that while continuing to meet the needs of batch 1 machining, the cell still has a rapid set-up and productivity of 250 doors per shift; the cell complies with Industry 4.0 demands with interconnected SCM technologies and integrated with software systems and IoT; fully integrated and automatic process management with barcode identification of incoming doors, handling robot and control supervisor software, with the option of connecting to company ERP/MES.
A major advantage is the great versatility – while being fully automatic, the cell can be taken over by an operator as required for more sophisticated manual machining work.
The process
The cell’s main strong point is its ability to deal with doors of varying size and weight. This is thanks to a top-performing articulated robot that picks up the doors from the different loading stacks and places them on the SCM aries prt feeding conveyor.
A bar code on the conveyor is used to automatically check that the door conforms with the machining program and the data is sent to the line supervisor software that runs a check and calls up the implementation programs of the cell’s machines.
If routing a peephole is scheduled, the door is transferred directly to the Aries PRT. If no peephole, the door is once again picked up from the conveyor by the robot and transferred to a specific position where a fixed spindle performs the routing of a peephole on the door manoeuvred by the robot. At the end of this operation, the robot once again places the door on the motorised conveyor to transfer it to the Aries PRT.
Aries PRT is a special machine that allows for parallel operating on both longitudinal sides with several operating units, to create routings on the left side for the hinges and machining work on the right side for the lock and handle holes, guaranteeing machining times of under a minute.
Once the machining work on the Aries PRT has been completed, a second articulated robot picks up the door from another conveyor belt and places it in one of the unloading stations (identification number can be personalised to suit the customer’s requirements) in compliance with the program instructions.
If further special machining work is scheduled, for example, glass fitting, the second robot loads the door onto the Accord 25FX drilling and routing machining centre. Its key advantages include the highly flexible MATIC bar work table capable of automatically positioning itself in just a few seconds in line with the program and door size. This guarantees a notable reduction in cycle times.
The process is completed with and efficient sorting and unloading station, where the doors are stacked in accordance with the order it belongs to.
