The machines that deburr, round and finish cut sheet metal parts will also soon be part of automated production lines in sheet metal processing. A trend that has not escaped specialist Q-Fin either. The machine builder even decided to set up a new department for it: Q-Fin Handling Solutions.
For Q-Fin, 2023 is a special year. In fact, the company celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. An existential milestone that heralds the beginning of a new era, in which digitalization and automation of the manufacturing industry are in full swing. In March this year, Q-Fin started the construction of a second building, which will become the home of Q-Fin Handling Solutions. The new premises should thus become a central meeting place for customers, partners and employees, where the latest technologies and products are developed and displayed.
Q-Fin Handling Solutions will develop and produce solutions that automate handling around deburring machines. Anton Bax is owner of Q-Fin, and emphasizes the need for this: "We want to maximize, if not completely relieve our loyal users of Q-Fin machines towards handling by taking care of picking up the parts, machining in the machine and finally depositing them completely for our account."
In this way, Q-Fin aims to be able to automatically load and unload more than 80 percent of the entire spectrum of sheet metal parts.
Specifically, this means facilities such as robots, reversing stations, return conveyors and lifting aids. At least as important is certainly software integration into the customer's production process. A prerequisite for this is that the deburring machines can be fully configured by software. The Q-Fin machines, for example, are already equipped for this. Meanwhile, an application has also been developed to link with all common ERP packages. Bax: "Such a link is not so interesting if you only have a robot that loads the machine, because this produces little data. But it does become interesting when 3D vision cameras control the whole deburring process, monitor it and then can feed back the net machining time in the deburring machine."
Immediately one of the aspects on which Q-Fin Handling Solutions puts its focus. Together with a number of partners, a large and a small cell have already been developed and are both operational. These cells use the latest 3D vision cameras, which recognize the products on a pallet and thus provide the information needed to control the entire process. Incidentally, in the field of vision technology, Q-Fin has partnered with Affix Engineering in Best. This means that in the automation of the deburring process, the latest laser vision camera from the German company Mech-Mind will be used. As a dealer, Affix will exclusively support Q-Fin in its applications in the deburring world.
Moreover, the deburring specialist has secured the cooperation of two launching customers who are willing to co-develop these new solutions: VDL Technics in Boxtel and INNO-metaal in Eindhoven. "A strength of us as a small OEM is that we take on the development of these solutions all by ourselves," said Bax. "We cooperate with various parties and therefore get the linking of our solutions to customers' production systems realized very quickly." ■
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