Feed Systems
Afag have been developing their feeding technology for over 50 years and, being based in Switzerland, they have grown up within the watch and zip manufacturing industry. This experience has allowed them to become world leaders in feeding small to medium size components.
Throughout their development they have developed a bowl tooling method which is unique to the industry.
The very nature of this tooling method allows them to feed very intricate and precise parts, at feed rates that
are above and beyond what is achievable through conventional feeding technology.
So what is this new technology?
Traditional feeding technology see's an experienced tooling engineer develop a bowl feeder using either
a sheet metal or cast aluminium bowl top shell. The engineer then spends time developing the tooling
required to feed the components at the desired rates. This is sometimes called "Cardboard Engineering"
or the "black art" of bowl feeding.
Afag's idea is different as they continually strive to acheive accurate and repeatable feed systems. To achieve this they now develop their bowl feeder tooling using the latest 3D CAD/CAM software. Instead of having a tooling engineer adding the
tooling as required, Afag now have highly experienced design engineers, designing the bowl feeder tooling
and bowl top shape. This 3D design is then sent directly to a 5-Axis CNC machining centre and the bowl
feeder top and tooling is machined from a single piece of material.
And what are the advantages?
Cycle Time
As the bowl top is machined from a single piece of material, the designer can design into the helical/feed
track any profile he chooses. This means he can machine a pre-orientation feature into the track which
only allows the components to feed up the track if they are in a certain orientation. They therefore reject
less components at the selection tooling, whereas with traditional tooling methods, the components feed to
the selection tooling in many orientations. Components which are mis-orientated are then rejected back into
the bowl feeder to start again. By rejecting less components at the selection tooling, we can therefore
increase the feed rate of the bowl feeder without increasing the vibration frequency.
Accuracy
As we are machining the bowl feeder, we are introducing machining accuracy and tolerances. We are
therefore able to feed much smaller and more precise parts. Please also read about our drive technology
to understand how this also helps to feed smaller parts.
Repeatability
Once the design of the bowl feeder is complete, there is no more development work to be done. If a
customer wants a repeat bowl feeder or even one left and one right hand bowl feeder, then it is as simple
as sending the original program to the CNC machining centre. We can then guarantee that the new bowl
feeder will be an exact copy to the original both in dimension and performance. And, as we do not need to
develop the bowl feeder again, there will be a cost reduction with the repeat system!
Call today: +44 (0) 1744 550051 / 613857
News
Events
We next exhibit at the Medtec exhibition in Galway, Ireland at the Radison SAS hotel. The event takes place during 23/24 September 2009 and you will locate us on stand 118.
