Nowadays, with more and more customized orders and products on the market, there are more and more cabins and sets with multiple varieties and small batches in the main engine factory.
For multiple varieties and small batch purchasing plans, how can the production shop quickly complete trial production of products and deliver them to the main engine factory?
The application of sheet metal technology in the production workshop is particularly important, especially the turret punching processing method, which shortens the product delivery cycle and reduces the processing cost, and can meet the needs of the main engine factory to time.
Parts with regular contour and complex contour of the internal cavity
In the tractor cabin and assembly parts, there are often parts with regular contours and many holes in the contour of the internal cavity.
At first, when planning the sheet metal process, the use of the flat laser cutting process for production and processing was considered.
There was no problem using the flat laser cutting process. However, with the increasing load of the flat laser cutting machine, flat laser cutting would become a bottleneck process.
Considering that our turret punching equipment (Figure 1) still has excess capacity, we began to optimize whether flat laser processed parts can be transferred to other processes.
Fig. 1 Tower drilling process equipment
By calculating the efficiency and cost of the processing process, it is found that parts with a regular contour, complex contour of the internal cavity or porous are processed by flat laser.
Obviously, the sheet metal preparation process is not ideal and the processing cost is high;
The cutting machine is used to shape, and then the turret punch is used to process the contour of the inner cavity, so the combined processing efficiency is very high and the cost is low.
At present, parts with regular appearance contour and complex internal cavity contour are processed by turret cutting and punching, which has very high efficiency and flexibility and can meet the needs of production planning.
Being a very successful case, a part of the cabin has a regular contour and large size.
After cutting (Fig. 2), the NC punch is used to punch the inner contour (Fig. 3).
Using material preparation and blanking, the processing time of each part is about 10s, while using flat laser cutting, the processing time of each part is about 72s.
The use of flat laser cutting results in the consumption of auxiliary materials.
At the same time, the daily maintenance cost is much higher than that of an ordinary cutting machine.
Through comparison, it is found that this type of part adopts the combined processing technology of material preparation and turret stamping and punching, which has high production efficiency and low production cost.
Fig. 2 Cutting and blanking
Fig. 3 Tower drilling
Production of parts of different varieties with general purpose blanks
With the diversified market demand, increasingly more orders and customized products, there are different configurations of vehicles with the same power, resulting in a variety of models with the same power.
For many models in the cabin and assembly, only the dimensions of the inner cavity contour are different and the contour is the same, therefore, small batches and parts of different varieties cannot be produced in the punch.
Currently, stamping processing is mainly carried out in large quantities, which has very high efficiency and low cost.
At present, the flat laser processing production mode can only be used for this kind of small batch and multi-variety parts.
The production efficiency of this type of part is very low and the processing cost is high, but customers do not pay for it.
They only pay the stamping processing cost, and the excess cost can only be amortized within the company.
Through process research, separate similar parts, classify the processing content into parts, and determine the basic parts, as shown in Fig.
Fig. 4 A common part
The production method of stamping process is adopted, and then the remaining internal contours required by each model are processed by turret stamping.
Dense Mesh Plate Parts
The flat laser cutting process is adopted in the trial production of new dense mesh plate part products, which can be delivered quickly, but the production of more than 20 units will seriously affect the production efficiency.
For example, for our protection plate parts (Fig. 5), due to the lack of an appropriate mesh plate purchased initially, laser flat cutting is used to secure the delivery node in advance.
Using flat laser processing, each part takes 30 minutes.
Fig. 5 Porous parts of the protection plate
With the continuous increase in the number of goods demanded in each batch, the progress of trial production of other new products is seriously affected.
Finally, the turret punching die is customized, the laser cutting flat shape is adopted, and the turret punching process is used to process the inner dense holes.
After adopting the new combined process, it is estimated that the flat laser cutting contour takes 1 minute, the actual processing of 183 holes on the turret takes 2 minutes, and each part only takes 3 minutes.
In the future, these kinds of similar parts with complex contours and dense holes in the inner cavity will adopt the combination of flat laser and turret punch, which makes more effective use of the advantages of each machine tool, resulting in higher production efficiency and lower cost.
Conclusion
Through research on some common problems in the actual tractor panel production process, combined with the capabilities of existing equipment, the combination of turret punching process and other processes is used to make full use of the processing advantages of each process and equipment, improve production efficiency and reduce production cost.
Only by continuously optimizing and improving the production process, solving the problems of actual production, avoiding the construction of more inventories and effectively dealing with various uncertainties brought by market changes can companies increase their comprehensive competitiveness.
