Screwdriving and box erecting at a fourth generation toolmaker
Sharpening tools manufacturing (knife and drill sharpeners) · Assembly or screwdriving · Vendor published
This account comes from a robot maker, integrator, or their marketing partner. Treat every performance and payback figure as advertising until an engineer verifies it against your own job.
The job
Darex, the family owned Oregon company behind the Work Sharp brand, assembles consumer knife sharpeners with many small screws in plastic housings. One cobot now drives screws into housings while another erects boxes and packs finished units on the same line, coordinated by the shop's own staff over standard industrial communications.
The shop
100 to 500 employees per the vendor case story; fourth generation family owned, based in Ashland, Oregon.
The equipment
Universal Robots UR3 with a pneumatic screw feeder and driver for screwdriving; Universal Robots UR5 for box erecting and packaging; in-house integration using Modbus, PLC controlled pneumatic press, and area scanners instead of hard guarding.
The published numbers
Payload: not published. Rate: production of four product batches per week versus two before automation, published-by-vendor; the operations director cites roughly 30 percent better efficiency, a vendor claim. Cost: not published. Payback: under 12 months against an initial 16 month estimate, a vendor claim.
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
Two things transferred the risk down here: the company self integrated with its own maintenance staff, and it started on a task, screwdriving, where cobots are forgiving and the failure mode is a missed screw rather than scrap. Consumer product assemblers should verify screw feed reliability with their actual fastener, since feeder jams, not robot motion, dominate downtime in screwdriving cells. The doubling of weekly product batches came from freeing people, so map which humans get redeployed and to what before counting the gain. Area scanners in place of cages preserved line access but require a proper safety assessment and periodic validation. Trade coverage of this line exists in Assembly Magazine, which is a good sign the story is more than a brochure.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Tell Joe what you are running. He will give you a straight preliminary read, and he will tell you if a robot is the wrong answer for your situation.
Read the assembly and screwdriving guide