Friday 03 October 2008
ABB robots help fabricate Finnish blades
FINLAND-based
Fiskars is using eight
ABB robots to increase its production flexibility, precision and efficiency.
The company manufactures cutting tools. Its factory near Helsinki fabricates half a million pairs of scissors, 850,000 axes and hundreds of thousands of gardening tools a year.
It is also the owner of famous brands like Wilkinson Sword and Kitchen Devils. At the core of the company’s success is the successful integration of plastics and steel in its products, as well as the high quality of its produced blades.
Eight ABB robots are integrated into various parts of the production line. In the injection moulding section, the robots are responsible for nearly a dozen tasks, all at high speed and with millimetre accuracy.
The robots lift the handles of gardening tools, feed them onto the assembly line, label them, and add blades and bolts to the handles to complete the products.
An ABB IRB 140 robot with three-dimensional vision guidance picks blades from a pile, sorts them into pairs, and places them at the correct angle for heat treatment at 950 degrees Celsius in an oven.
Another robot sharpens blades to within a fraction of a millimetre, while an IRB 540 sprays Teflon onto axe blades with precision.
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