Worm Gear Screw Jacks Manufactured With Flexible Automation

The production of worm gear screw jacks—electromechanical actuators that convert a rotary motion into a linear motion—was a laborious process at the Zimm company from Austria in the past. For example, the individual components used to be clamped manually onto pallets which was both time-consuming and had high production costs. A project by the Lindau-based automation specialist Vischer & Bolli Automation and its cooperation partner proves that it can also be simplified. Together they developed a flexible manufacturing cell for about 30 different types of screw jacks. In addition to a five-axis milling machine from Grob, which ensures that high-precision components are created from the raw material, two KUKA robots are used here, which take over the loading and unloading of the fixtures and workpieces with their subsequent finishing in a fully automated manner in a modular production cell. The specially adapted clamping technology and sensors from Vischer & Bolli Automation guarantee reliable processing in the cell and machine.