Fitting O-rings into a plunger

• I want to improve product quality and uniformity
• I want to increase productivity
• I want to reduce the number of employees working on this process

Further explanation:

Slide 1 shows the core element of the cell; two sliders that are designed to take all components for the plunger (left) and extension piston (right). The first picture shows the raw locations, the right one with the bullets in place (extension piston side is not complete). The bullets will be in place at all times, except when the robot removes them for the assembly operation. There are four bullet locations shown at the moment; we are experimenting with pushing both O ring and PTFE seal down together but this has not been fully trialled. The bullets are shown without the robot pick-up points (because the right ones have been nicked by assembly as they are better than theirs!) - in reality all bullets will have the same pick up diameter, and the length of the pick up point will vary to ensure that the overall distance from the top of the bullet to the seal groove remains constant (allowing us to use one pusher for all variants). Plungers and extensions vary, but the locations will remain the same - bullets may need to be changed over. Slide two shows the bullets loaded with the seals and the plunger loaded to its location. This will be done by the man. Once everything is loaded, the man pushes the side into position - a sensor will pick up on the presence of the carriage and give the robot the "go" signal (it will finish whatever its doing first obviously). Depending on timings, the slide may have to be returned automatically via a weak pneumatic cylinder. The final slide shows the two main components. Diameters vary, but the top feature of the extension remains constant and can be picked up by our gripper. Similarly the top diameter between the two seal grooves of the plunger is constant and can be picked up by the gripper. The basic seal fitting operation is as follows; 1) Place bullet (with O ring) onto part 2) put down bullet, pick up pusher, push O ring into place. 3) put down pusher, pick up bullet with PTFE seal and place onto part. 4) put down bullet, pick up pusher and push PTFE seal into place. The sizing operation is basically picking up the part and pushing it in a controlled manner into a polished bore. The extension is relatively simple; both seal fitting operations can be performed on the carriage, then the robot picks the part up and places it in a sizer, which will effectively be where the next operation picks the part up from. As soon as the extension piston leaves the carriage it can be returned to its first position. The plunger will have four out of five seal operations performed on the carriage. It must then be picked up and inverted for the final operation (gland seal fitting). I have some ideas about combining this operation and the next one (sizing of the PTFE seals), but we can talk about that. EITHER the last (sizing) operation is done at the exit of the cell, or else the robot then picks the article up and places it at the side of the cell. My preference is the latter, as there is one more check; at the moment the manual operation has a vision system to ensure that the gland seal (the green one) is the right way up. It takes a hell of a lot of force to assemble a plunger into a body with it the wrong way up, but someone managed it once so we tell our customers that’s what we do! The robot can use its force sensors to alarm out if we push the plunger into a locator with its gland seal on the wrong way.