Remco shows off hybrid automated products

CINCINNATI—Grandview, Mo.-based Roller Equipment Manufacturing Co. Inc. is bringing new capabilities to the rubber roller market with new products such as its GY Limited Automation series.

General Manager Mark Andrews talked about the new offerings from Remco, which designs and manufactures extrusion and finishing systems for strip building, at the Rubber Roller Group meeting in Cincinnati.

The new GY LA model brings an upgrade to the control system for grinding machines, Andrews said. In the past, the company has sold manual controlled machines as well as multi-axis servo controlled machines to do automated processes such as grinding, grooving and crowning.

The new model is a "kind of hybrid machine" that has a motion controller to control the position of the grinding head to automate the process, Andrews said.

"Then rather than using servo drives on the rest of the machine, we're simply controlling the variable speed drives over ethernet," Andrews said. "That ethernet link allows us to simplify that wiring and give additional control over the various control aspects of the machine."

The new line has a touch screen interface, and settings can be saved in a recipe to standardize the process, Andrews said.

"You can call back up, the spindle's going to go this speed, at this many RPM. It's going to go in that direction and start at this point in time," he said. "All that's stored in a recipe so that you can just call that back up and repeat it time and time again."

The model, which is available, took the name "Limited Automation" because it's not fully servo-controlled, allowing for the positioning of the grinding head for the diameter, he said.

"But we're controlling speeds, feeds, directions, starts, stops and so forth, and are able to call that back up and save it in recipes," Andrews said.

The GY LA brings some automation capabilities without the cost of a full-blown system, tying together components used in a "normal" manually operated machine, but with the benefit of an "executive" that can talk to and direct those other drives, Andrews said.

"You get the functionality of automation, so it's kind of a win-win situation for our customer," Andrews said.The information the GY LA creates in its use could be collectible data, but customers, so far, haven't requested the capability to harness it, he said.

"We've talked to customers about whether they want those metrics, and we get kind of a tepid response," Andrews said. "Most people don't have the infrastructure to maintain that information."

Another benefit of the addition of limited automation is that it can make it easier to maintain quality and standards across operators, Andrews said. An expert operator's experience is useful, but can mean some difficulty in transitioning to a newly purchased machine or to training a new operator.

"We feel like the limited automation will help where you can set the parameters and just call that back up," Andrews said. "It's not going to eliminate the operator, somebody's got to get the process started and know how to finish it and handle the material after it's been built. But that limited automation helps that whole process along and takes some of the worry out of the potential problems."

Customer benefitsAnother change to the grinder system that has gotten positive response from customers is a change to the tailstock, he said. While the tailstock used to be mounted on a flat and a V-way like a conventional lathe, Remco now mounts the tailstock on the same linear ball rails as the grinder carriage.

"By moving the tailstock, it does not introduce taper into the system. Even with the best V-way system, you might get a few thousandths of taper, but when it's on the same rail as the grind areas, it maintains that," Andrews said. "It makes a big difference for an operator, because you don't have to take a test grind and then offset the tailstock manually, and then take another grind. It's a time saver, which means it saves money."

Remco's grinders also have bucked another design trend in its new grinding bases. In the past, grinding bases have been manufactured out of fabricated metal, but within the last two years, Remco started having grinding bases cast. The company sectionalizes them, making 1.5-meter and 3-meter lengths, and joining them to match the necessary length for the machine. One major benefit for the customer is that casting is very "dead" material, meaning it absorbs vibration and stabilizes the grinding machine for accuracy.

A big part of the move was to save cost, as the casting business in the U.S. has struggled, and offshoring became necessary for the process, he said. As the fabrication of the bases was becoming exorbitantly expensive, Remco wanted to avoid passing that growing cost on to customers.

"We had to offshore the casting aspect of it. While we don't necessarily enjoy that part of it, that was just the reality of manufacturing," Andrews said.

The savings for Remco has been "significant," taking close to about 50 percent out of the process cost, he said.

"It was necessary. It's hard to compete if your machines cost more than you would sell them for," Andrews said.

Other products

Remco also developed the RTK, a thermal knife used for grooving, overbuild and removal. The RTK includes digital controls, which ties back to the limited automation processes.

"So you can not only put in a grinder speed, but you can put in a knife power setting and be able to call that up. And it automatically sets the heat setting on the knife, and you're able to use it for grooving or overbuild removal," Andrews said.

The RTK is the company's first offering for that segment, a move in an effort to be a go-to company for whatever needs to be done for a rubber roller manufacturer, Andrews said.

"We saw it as a natural step for the limited automation or the more automated machinery where they would be tied in seamlessly with that," he said.

A smaller modification for its grinding machine series is the removal of bellows covers from linear rails, Andrews said. Originally, the company used accordion covers to keep grindings off of the linear rails. But as the parts aged, the bellows covers became a nuisance in upkeep and replacement. If the covers fell apart, new parts were expensive. Instead of the bellows covers, Remco is using sealed auto lubricating ball bearings, which allows grindings to scrape away in the machine's movement.

"We increased our cost by putting on the auto lubrication and scrapers, and it's kind of an offsetting thing," Andrews said. "The benefit is mostly to our customers, because they don't have to replace the bellows covers."

In the company's stripbuilding offerings, Remco has made several small adjustments, Andrews said. One example is the addition of tape tension readouts, which allows measurement without having to come into contact with the tape.

"People would thump the tape to see how tight it was. It's a safety issue. You're touching the tape going at 60 psi or 150 psi, you get caught in there and it doesn't let go very easily," he said.

Remco also developed what Andrews called the "rapid build system," which allows operators to open up the die to make the strip larger, meaning additional capability for more volume. The system is "beefed up" downstream such as at the application head, allowing it to use the larger strip to drive up throughput while still getting good results in stripbuilding applications.

"Everybody wants to improve their throughput. Everybody wants to decrease the amount of time it takes to build a product and leave more time for building additional products," Andrews said. "You have two ways to improve your throughput. You get a bigger extruder or you allow more material to come out of a smaller extruder in the same amount of time. That's the direction we went with for that and felt like it would be beneficial to our customers."

Remco also added some limited automation to its stripbuilder platform, with programmable logic controller motorized functions and recipe storage of the build parameters, including temperature, motor speed and direction, Andrews said.

The company has seen a big increase in business in the first six months of 2019, so much so that it's almost been a struggle to keep up, he said. As some sectors ebb and flow in demand, the petroleum industry segment has been growing recently.

Beginning in the latter part of last year, interest and quotations picked up, and Remco currently is booked through June with more orders in the pipeline. Comparatively, the previous year was more of a break-even year, when Remco used the slow market to focus on new product development.