The Solution
The assembly system was designed around a race track-type conveyor. The conveyor system ran in a continuous loop, feeding pallets from station to station and indexing the pallets every 4.5 seconds to give the required throughput. The pallets had tooled plates mounted to the top face to allow accurate location of the component parts, making up the machine ‘nests’.
On the system, there are a number of stations carrying out checks that ensure that the assembled parts are present and that the correct part is installed for the relevant assembly. The pips and the headless screws are checked to ensure they are present, and the PCB is also checked to ensure it is the correct variant.
For assemblies that failed an inspection at any stage, the assembly stations up streamed from the failure point onwards inhibited reducing wastage of components. Once the failed assembly reaches the reject station, all parts in the nest will be unloaded into a reject collection box.
Completed and verified assemblies are picked and placed onto an offload conveyor, which transports the assemblies to the test equipment.
