Join Gary Kowalski, Senior District Manager at FANUC AMERICA, and Dan Allford, President of ARC Specialties, as they reminisce on some of their past projects. They will go over some of their failure, successes, and proudest achievements in the robotics industry.
At ARC Specialties, most of our robotic cutting systems are based on plasma. But plasma is limited on part thickness. My rule of thumb is you need 100 amps of power per inch of thickness. There are a few systems that can cut up to 4″, but in my opinion, 2″ is the practical limit for economical plasma cutting.
ARC Specialties designs and builds turnkey robotic systems. Part of the process is the fabrication of welded steel frames. See our video below to learn how and why we use flux-cored arc welding (FCAW) to build all of our robotic manufacturing cells.
Spot welding is one of the most common uses for robots in industry. Most cars have thousands of spot welds joining the chassis and bodywork. People think spot welding is just for high-volume jobs with limited quality requirements. This episode shows how resistance welding can be used for high-quality, precision parts.
MIAB is an extremely fast way to butt weld small pipe and tube. The process was developed at the E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute in Kiev, Ukraine. MIAB has some unique advantages for high production joining. The process is not as widely known or utilized in the United States as it should be.
ESW is a variation of submerged arc welding. Both use granular flux for shielding. Both are older processes with unique advantages. Deoxidizers in the flux reduce oxides and produce superb welds. There is no visible arc, almost no smoke and extremely high deposition rates. ESW deposits up to 60 pounds of metal per hour, 10 times faster than MIG or TIG.
This week we feature a Gas Tungsten Arc (GTAW) single-sided pipe welding project.
What if there was an arc welding process that could weld thick sections and fine mesh metal screens? And did not require grounding of the part. And could automatically weld over scale and rust by reducing oxides?
What is good fit up? And why is it crucial to the success of a welding project?
Dan Allford, President of ARC Specialties and the host of Roboticist Chronicles, meets with Dave Hebble, ARC Specialties’ Technical Services Manager, to expand on the idea of fit up and explain it to the rest of the company. The two have worked together since the late 70s, with Hebble acting as Allford’s mentor ever since.
You can trace a lot of robotic system failures to poorly fitted parts, explain Allford.
“With machining, you impose your will on the part. You take the part and you remove everything you don’t want… In welding, the part imposes its will on you. In other words, the shape of the part we can’t change – we just have to deal with it.”
Hebble also touched on defining the scope and flow of a welding project before getting started on it. “What is good fit up?” he asked. “Good fit up means something different to each person, so before you start, that needs to be defined.”
Allford added that, to him, fit up meant three things: joint accuracy, fixture accuracy and robot accuracy. All of those things could potentially add even more confusion to the process, emphasizing the importance of defining the flow.
“Before you can figure out which problem to fix, you’ve got to figure out which problem you have,” he said.
Subscribe to ARC Specialties’ Roboticist Chronicles podcast to learn more about the nuts and bolts of robots, automation and the implications of an evolving machine workforce.
I’ve heard that if you can’t fix it; feature it. I was thinking about arc blow, a problem caused by arc deflection due to magnetic force from magnetized parts or the flow of current in a conductor. ARC Specialties uses AC hot wire, for this reason, to negate the arc blow from hotwire current. At 60 Hz alternating current negates the effect.
