Eliminate Your Weld Cell Downtime
, by Jim Ryan, 5 min reading time
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Since you clicked on this post, you probably have downtime headaches in your weld cells. Like all of our customers, you are extremely skeptical and have a Missouri-style "Show me!" attitude. You're already thinking of clicking away because this post is sounding like it's probably baloney already. I love that about our customers! They don't believe in BS.
This post brings videos that "show you". When you're through, you still won't believe me, but you'll pick up the phone and bring me to your shop because you'll think, "Hmm. Let's get this guy in to show me. Have him bring some samples we can install. He can give our new maintenance techs training on how proxes work while he's here."
Okay? Here goes.
I came across this 2013 article at Shop Metalworking Technology magazine by Thomas Jaeger: 7 Ways to Robotic Welding Cost Savings. It's fine, but once again I hang my head in sadness at how incomplete it is, lacking one special thing. If Jaeger only knew about Weld Dynamix weld cell components! All the man-hours lost over the years! For no good reason! But how was he to know? Weld Dynamix was just in the womb when Jaeger wrote it, the womb being our R & D shop. Here is what Jaeger's article is missing:
The most important way to cut weld cell costs is to use components so tough that they don't cause you downtime by wearing out and needing to be replaced. Downtime is money.
At FABTECH last week, I found myself saying to everyone who came to see our booth, "This booth is all about eliminating downtime. That's what Weld Dynamix does. We eliminate downtime."
Weld Dynamix components are ultra tough. Impact, heat, abrasion, and weld spatter find themselves in a hopeless predicament when they attempt to wear out our
- Proxes
- Cables
- Mounts
- Cable protection
For example, our proxes. See the half-coated prox in the photo heading up this post? Half shows what happens if you don't use our coated proxes: downtime due to weld spatter. The other half of the prox is coated and it shows you sailing along with no downtime. Even the threads on the coated side are just fine. At our booth at FABTECH last week, an executive of a very prominent welding company asked me, "Uh huh. How often does it need a recoat?" I said, "There is no recoat." He looked at me stunned. "One and done. It ships to you coated and that's it," I said. After seeing all our components at our booth he said, "I can't believe it! How come I haven't heard of Weld Dynamix?!" Well, we're a startup, buddy. We've been around less than five years. But thousands of our components are on floors now and they're doing great. No complaints yet!
Please settle in to a few short, eye-opening videos to see for yourself. This is a total of about five minutes of video. Afterwards, you'll probably want to pick up the phone and call us to come see you.
Let's make a meal of these videos, starting with the appetizer, which may be our best product of all.
1. 20 seconds: Appetizer. Our cable protection. It slips on in five seconds without your having to disconnect the cable at either end. Cable damage headache gone. Enjoy!
2. Three minutes. The main course. A montage of our components taking abuse as if it were nothing. You'll say, "Wait a sec" and want to watch this one twice. If you have any question about what is happening in this video, just call me.
3. Dessert. You can skip dessert unless you want to see more about our Mini Flat Pack inductive proximity sensor standing up to the abuse you saw in the montage. A minute and a half. This sensor is our toughest product. The coating makes it immune to abrasion and weld spatter. Here we see the sensor wearing out a steel brush over the course of the week at FABTECH, and it functions just fine.
4. Coffee. You will click this video off after about thirty seconds, saying "I've seen enough. Get these guys on the phone. Let's bring them in to see if this is legit." The video is a little over two minutes long. It's our Cube 40 mount for 30 mm proxes. It comes in both steel and nonmetallic models. The nonmetallic model is inductively transparent and withstands 1,000 strikes by a four-pound sledge hammer in the video. You can flush-mount unshielded proxes with it!
You have presses? Stamping? Our proxes make double-blank detection possible, and our Mini Flat Pack is good for places where it will get whacked. So, we aren't just for weld cells. We have weldable RFID tags, too. Think of matching machine components with tags that are welded on, so that you can flag any mismatch to avoid more downtime.
One last thing. Jaeger mentioned the importance of training your techs as a way of reducing costs. That's right. That's why we offer free 1-hour training to your techs when we're in your shop. The training is 100% hands-on, so that your techs see how to wire proxes and how proxes see metal.