Industrial Automation – It Doesn’t Have To…
Join us as we explore all things Industrial Automation. Brandon Ellis, owner & president of elliTek, has seen the good, the bad, and the great when it comes to automation. We'll delve into the challenges that manufacturers face, find out what it doesn't have to..., and have some fun!
Industrial Automation – It Doesn’t Have To…
Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To... Be Boring
Today's topic is definitely not boring! The sparks are flying as we delve into the world of robotic welding.🤖🔥
Why would you use a robot to weld instead of a person? That's were Brandon's Brandoloy for the four reasons to automate come into play.
- Quality / Consistency
- Decrease Cycle Time / Increase Production
- Reclassification of Labor
- Flexibility / Quick Setup
Listen to hear why collaborative robots might be better for welding applications than industrial robots.
You'll also hear how the types of materials affect the robot welding application.
Why isn't it reasonable to get a robot and an off the shelf welder?
Stayed tuned as Brandon shares insights into the considerations that need to be made when you're working with an automation company to implement a robotic weld work cell.
Last but not least... Is the mullet making a comeback?
This is elliTek's podcast video debut! Feeds went live on Tuesday, October 19th at noon EDT. Here's the link to the podcast on elliTek's YouTube channel, https://youtu.be/CZmFGMDDIrk.
If you can't catch the video on YouTube, here's a link to the Welding Application video referenced during the show, https://youtu.be/0P1BIykOm2I.
No matter where you are in your automation journey, elliTek will meet you there!
Reach out to us with any questions or future topics.
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ellitek-inc
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If you don't want to click on those links, pick up the phone and call us at (865) 409-1555 ext. 804.
#elliTekAutomationNation
Industrial Automation – It Doesn’t Have To… Be Boring
Brandon Ellis 0:00
Thanks for joining us for today's topic. It's an exciting topic. We're going to be talking about robotic welding. So, let's let the sparks fly. Join us.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have to... In case you're new to our program, I'm Brandon Ellis, and I'm your host and also the owner of elliTek. Before we start today's episode, I just want to ask that you consider hitting the follow button, and the subscribe button, depending upon the platform you're listening upon. Also, if you're listening on Apple podcasts and you enjoy what you hear, please go to the show page and scroll to the bottom, leave us a five-star rating and review. Now that we've got the marketing out of the way, I want to say thanks for tuning in. So, let's get started with today's episode.
Hey guys, welcome today to Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have to. I'm Brandon Ellis, your host, the owner of elliTek, and I'm here with Miss Beth Elliot. Hey, Beth.
Beth Elliott 1:00
Hey, Brandon. Hey, everybody, how y'all doing?
Brandon Ellis 1:03
So we're back at it? What's this episode?
Beth Elliott 1:07
It's episode four, four. Yeah, yeah.
Brandon Ellis 1:09
Number four.
Beth Elliott 1:11
Yeah, I don't know if anybody, if you guys listened to the last episode about It Doesn't Have to be Vague. We talked about some projects and stuff and considerations. But there were mentions of video.
Brandon Ellis 1:26
It was vague.
Beth Elliott 1:30
There was a little mishap. So that was on me.
Brandon Ellis 1:34
Do you want to tell us about it?
Beth Elliott 1:36
No. I'm learning. So, we're trying it again today.
Brandon Ellis 1:43
We wanted to surprise you guys with the video this season. And the surprise was, the video didn't work last time, so we made some references to that.
Beth Elliott 1:54
I tried to get them cut out, but I didn't get all of them.
Brandon Ellis 1:57
We thought it would be interesting for you guys just to kind of, you know, wander around, feel yourselves around the room and wondering why is there no video on this thing? So, what are our video streaming services? Certainly, this is on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, our YouTube channel specifically.
Beth Elliott 2:19
Those are the three that I was putting it on. I will.
Brandon Ellis 2:23
Welcome, if you're watching us. Hey guys, you're seeing us in our element, in our environment here in the elliTek web, podcasting studios here at elliTek, a part of our elliTek University Center. Hey, I want to do a quick little shout out, you were telling me about some of our listeners. She gets to see not who you are, but where you are.
Beth Elliott 2:48
Yeah, that's all we get, is location.
Brandon Ellis 2:50
And that's really geographically. We’ve started building kind of an audience, kind of a #theElliTekAutomationNation, is what we're calling that; so, I want to say hello to everyone, we've had quite a few downloads over the last year, I want to thank you all for that. But shout out to the elliTek Automation Nation in Melbourne, Australia.
Beth Elliott 3:14
That’s right, thank you guys for listening. The last five episodes you surpassed our local listening audience.
Brandon Ellis 3:22
Which would be the good old US of A. So yeah, thank you guys. It's very interesting, the reach that we get, glad you are getting a lot out of the episode. But today is really exciting. So go ahead. And not just because we have video working.
Beth Elliott 3:39
It is, it is. Well, it's gonna be exciting because we're talking about robotic welding.
Brandon Ellis 3:43
That's right. So hit us with the title.
Beth Elliott 3:45
All right, It's Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have to be Boring.
Brandon Ellis 3:51
That's right. Because what we did is we welded. So, what's the big deal about welding? There's a lot of people that weld.
Beth Elliott 3:59
There are, so why would folks choose a robot to weld over a person?
Brandon Ellis 4:04
So robotic welding is the exciting thing that we're doing today, and I'm excited about it because we've been doing a lot of robotic welding.
Beth Elliott 4:14
It's fun to watch.
Brandon Ellis 4:16
I love welding, I'm not a great welder, but let me tell you something, I can weld a lot, I can weld perfectly if I have a robot with a welder. And so yeah, so why would we do that? Well, we go back to Brandology.
Yeah. Brandology. That's the one. Can you all see? You can't really see the board. I've got a few buttons here. But it's now a thing. I'm not going to label them.
Beth Elliott 4:54
You get what you get.
Brandon Ellis 4:55
Yeah. And so, I mess up sometimes. So, you're seeing it here live. This is live action. So yeah, we have to bring out the Brandology, the four reasons to automate. And those four reasons are quality consistency... And again, these four things, just to review, if you're not familiar with these, it's my four things that if you are going to automate a process, and this is with a robot or just with, with machine automation, whatever,
Beth Elliott 5:22
Automation in general.
Brandon Ellis 5:25
In general. So, whether it's pneumatics, whether it's electric, servos, robots, whatever, why are we spending the money? Why is this a focus? What can we expect out of automating this process? And it really should fall in, the focus should be at least one of these. Now, the benefits may go outside of one of these four, but you want your primary focus, your primary reason to be one of these four, and not in this order. Increase quality and consistency, decrease in cycle time, or we call that increased production, reclassification of labor, or flexibility, quick setup. So, let's talk about those really quickly: Quality consistency, doing it better, you're going to see what that looks like, because a robot can weld better than Brandon. I'm not saying than anybody, but definitely me. It can weld better than me. It also can do it longer, and those kinds of things. So, we have decreased cycle time, increased production, because it doesn't have to take lunch breaks, and smoke breaks, and wee-wee breaks and things of that nature, and doesn't get tired. Reclassification of labor, we're going to talk a little bit about the guy that's actually in the shot of the video that we're going to show.
Beth Elliott 6:48
Are you ready for that?
Brandon Ellis 6:49
No, I’ll let it slip. But it's new, it's exciting.
Beth Elliott 6:56
I know. It's not boring.
Brandon Ellis 6:57
But for those of you who are listening to the podcast on one of our audio streaming apps, certainly we're going to try and talk, I'll try and be as descriptive as possible. But one of the guys that was involved with this, and setting this up, is one of our welders. So, we're not going to replace him with a robot, not by any stretch, but he, now, can help set up robots to weld.
Beth Elliott 7:21
Wow. And he is not a computer person at all.
Brandon Ellis 7:25
He is not, and he wouldn't mind me referencing him by name. Todd is his name. And we love to have Todd around here, but Todd makes it very clear he is not, not, not, nor shall he ever be, a PC guy. So, he's not a programmer, but we'll talk about why that's possible. So, reclassification of labor, if we were doing like, if our business was repetitive welding, you need somebody who's an expert at welding. But quickly, if you use the right parts, if you work with the right company, as Todd showed, you can set this up without even needing the PC, without even needing to be a computer guy. And so, imagine now, I mean, Todd's a good welder, he can weld fast, but imagine if he had three or four robots that he was running, and they're all welding, and he's monitoring them, and monitoring the systems and things of that nature, reclassification of labor. That's exactly what that is. And then flexibility, quick setup; that means the welder can go from one piece to the next, to the next, to the next, without a whole lot of change over or having to rethink your stuff, and that kind of stuff like a person would have. So, we get close to seeing benefits across all four, but one of the primary things is quality consistency. And then the number two, or maybe they're tied for number one is decreased cycle time and increased production. That's why I think folks would use a robot to weld, cost comes into play. I mean, certainly you're buying a robot. So that's something that needs to be considered. But if your business is consistent welding of parts, and now if no two parts are ever alike, that might be difficult. It's very difficult. But if you're always welding the same thing in a production environment, that makes a lot of sense pretty quickly.
Beth Elliott 9:20
What about... What would be the benefit of a collaborative robot over an industrial robot for welding?
Brandon Ellis 9:26
Well, you've heard me say in the past that I think welding and collaborative robots go together. What is it? Forrest Gump says, like peas and carrots, is that it?
Beth Elliott 9:36
I don't, I don't know.
Brandon Ellis 9:39
Anyway, yeah, because... Let me get to that in a second. So industrial robots, industrial robots are very accurate, very quick and things of that nature, and honestly, you know, we have our pre-engineered solutions, that elliTek puts together where we pre-engineer a robot with the base and all this kind of stuff, and safety if you want it, and all that kind of stuff is handled, and we'd let you take care of the programming and everything. We don't offer one that's all set up for welding, because the two primary industrial robots that we carry, which is, Yaskawa Motoman and FANUC, they actually have weld cells ready to go.
Beth Elliott 10:13
Ah, nice.
Brandon Ellis 10:14
And we sell those, and support those. And so that's put together all ready to go. But an industrial robot has to have, you know, good safety. Because industrial robots…
Beth Elliott 10:25
They're not gonna stop.
Brandon Ellis 10:27
They're not going to stop, they're inherently unsafe as far as humans, and so you have to guard them, hard guarding, things of that nature. And when you're welding, whether it be collaborative or industrial, you also have to guard passerby’s, passer byers, you know, people working in the vicinity, because of the weld arc flash. Weld arc light is like looking into the sun, and it can damage your retina, it can cause short term damage, long term damage, and so that's the reason welders always wear masks and things of that nature, they have the dark glass and that kind of thing. And so, you can do this with weld curtains or a solid barrier or something, but you have to do that no matter if it's industrial or collaborative. Collaborative brings about some interesting things, though. Remember, and again, this is why I think collaboratives and welding go together well: Collaborative robots. We did an episode when I talked about how people say that collaborative robots are slow.
Beth Elliott 11:27
Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon Ellis 11:29
Well, they're slow because you're having to do... If you're going to truly try to, which I've never, I've never seen anybody use a collaborative robot 100% collaboratively, which means that the force sensors are all that you're relying upon as far as safety. And if you do that, because of your safety, you still have to do a safety analysis, a risk analysis. You calculate, it really comes down to whatever you're carrying, what's the pounds per square inch of the force, and that kind of stuff. If it's a really wide blunt object, and you disperse that, that force across a larger area, so more square inches. But if it's a really pointy object, then you're concentrating that, and so you're going to have to do, at least, a safety light scanner, or some types of light curtains, or maybe even some light duty guarding, hard guarding of some sort. So, you're going to have to guard it. If you don't, if you don't, then what you have to do is reduce the speed. So, remember, people saying “collaborative robots are slow”, they're slow because you're not guarding them correctly, you have to go slow. Well, with welding, with the exception of two moves, moving toward the object and moving away from the object, you probably want to do those pretty quickly, but when you're welding, it's pretty slow. You have to go slow. And so that's why I think it kind of lends itself to collaborative robots. The other thing is collaborative robots... Did I mention that Todd hates PCs? You know, we have a video.
Beth Elliott 13:14
Yes. All right. So, we're gonna try this out. All right.
Brandon Ellis 13:18
So, here's the video, elliTek presents. Yeah, so we're using a Hanwha HCR-5A, one of our collaborative robots. And honestly, the welder we're using is just an off-the-shelf. It's a manual welder, we just have bypassed it, and don't do this, we can do this, but you want to use a real welder that's made for automated welding. But if you're looking at the video, it's making a pass, it's a linear pass in this shot, we did some curved pass, smart passes and stuff like that, doing some curved welds. But this is a linear, long linear weld. And the guy there to the right...
Beth Elliott 13:53
That's getting sparks all over him.
Brandon Ellis 13:55
With the weld helmet and nothing else. So don't get on to me about safety.
Beth Elliott 13:59
He's a welder. He knows what he’s doing.
Brandon Ellis 14:00
He's there watching the weld. And he's at it.
Beth Elliott 14:03
Look at those beads there.
Brandon Ellis 14:10
Yeah, so it made a perfect, perfect fillet there between two pieces. And so, it was exciting to see, so if you're watching this, you can kind of get an idea of that.
Beth Elliott 14:18
I'm gonna rewind that and just see that, there we go.
Brandon Ellis 14:29
Yeah. Stacking dimes. So, I had a conversation yesterday with one of our mechanical engineers, Joe, and I said, I said laying dimes, and he said, “No, no, no, it's stacking dimes”. So, we got on Google and got a little bit of “What is it?” The term is correctly, stacking dimes. But then there were some things on Google where people had used dimes to indicate what it looks like, and it's dimes that are laying on their side, so they're one on top of the other. Okay, well I'm like “Those dimes are laying upon each other.” Stacking dimes is what you do when you go to Vegas, and you have the chips”. That's a stack.
Beth Elliott 15:12
That's what I was thinking, because when you stack something, it's stacked.
Brandon Ellis 15:16
Yeah. One atop the other. We decided that technically, laying dimes and stacking dimes, but that stacking dimes wins as far as the cool factor. So, it's more cool to say, so if you're out there welding and you don't want to be like me and sound like you're an idiot, don't say laying dimes, say stacking dimes.
Beth Elliott 15:39
Okay, so anyway, did you want to get back to the video? Or?
Brandon Ellis 15:42
Well, we'll pop back to that picture, you can kind of see some of the stuff there.
Beth Elliott 15:46
There we go. Oh, doggonit. Yeah, excuse me.
Brandon Ellis 15:50
She's backing it up. She's working the controls. The cool thing is I'm not doing this, Beth’s controlling this.
Beth Elliott 15:57
Sorry, guys.
Brandon Ellis 16:00
So, video means new software as well. So, I get to handle all the sounds. But she takes care of the video. So, it's a good, it's a good marriage there. But we're looking at that weld, it filled in very, very well. You can see, we call that the penetration marks, you can see on the sides, where the depth of penetration, you're seeing the heat through the part, and so it's kind of darker, now we set this up, and for those that are welders, they're looking at this and saying you didn't clean your parts first. And you're exactly right, we weren't so worried about that, we were just making a couple pieces, we wanted to see what the robot would do, we were focused on the welding, and not really the prep. And so, there's a little bit more... Some of the impurities you can see coming out there, but it's still a very good weld, nothing a wire brush wouldn't fix. But the fact is that it took us about five minutes to set that robot up to do that weld. And it's done. We just had a very makeshift fixture, but if you have a good fixture that would reliably place the part in every time, then it's just a matter of place it in there, hit start and walk away. Even with manual tending, you can have just this stuff working over and over and over again. Again, number two in the four reasons to automate: Decreased cycle time and increased production. That leads to... Now that you got your robot welding, you just stick a robot out there tending.
Beth Elliott 17:43
Oh, okay.
Brandon Ellis 17:49
One puts the part and takes the finished part out, and then flips around with the other gripper on the other side, lays the right parts into the fixture, and gets out of the way and the welding robot comes in and starts welding it up, so that robot that’s discarding or placing the welded part goes over and gets the other two parts for the next load and as soon as it's done it pulls those parts in and you just ride down the road.
Beth Elliott 18:17
Nice. That's automation right there
Brandon Ellis 18:19
That's right. I guess the question that you’d ask is “Why would folks use a robot to weld instead of a person?” Well, you use a person to get it set up, Todd set that up. But then, once it’s done the person is just kind of managing at that point. And they can be managing multiples and multiples and multiples, reclassification of labor. And you get consistency, you get quality, you get decreased cycle time, that comes down to ROI, return on investment.
Beth Elliott 18:57
You don't have your cha-ching button, do you?
Brandon Ellis 19:01
I don’t. I need a “cha-ching”. Now that you one-upped us with the video, I’m gonna have to get better sound effects.
Beth Elliott 19:07
It took two weeks to get us there, so… So how did the types of materials affect the robot welding application?
Brandon Ellis 19:19
Well in that video we're welding just regular steel, cold rolled steel. And you're right, there's different types of materials or metals. So certainly the folks that are familiar with them would be welding just regular steel of various types. I’m kind of categorizing them all as just steel. There's, you know, there's all kinds of different types of steel from cold rolled to tools.
Beth Elliott 19:46
I remember that from the 3D printing podcast.
Brandon Ellis 19:51
Tool steels and all this kind of stuff. But normally you wouldn't weld tool steels, I don't think. You'd normally weld cold rolled or something like that. But also, there's aluminum. And then another common one is stainless steel. So stainless steel has a different makeup as far as what's in it, than just regular steel, which is the main reason they call it stainless. It's got... I think it's chromium. I think it's increased chromium. I think it's chromium. Sorry, I'm not a metallurgist, I program robots. And I'm certainly not a welder. So, Todd probably could tell us. But I think it's chromium, that’s increased chromium or high chromium that's inside the mix that creates stainless. And so, chrome doesn't rust. Regular steel has got a high iron content, and iron rusts. And so those are some things that come down, but when you weld them... Let's talk about that, we've got a graphic there. Okay, so I want to go through what... And this is just a standard MIG gun. And so yeah, it is. So, looking at the different components and this is not going to be a, you know, Brandon is an expert kind of thing. But really, what you've got is you got a piece of wire coming out the end, the end is down there with the welding words labeled on this graphic, the welding electrode, and so that's the end that's the part where the, that's where the fire is. And so going back to the welder, inside of that, it's a hollow tube, and this wire is fed down there. So that type of wire, what the wire is made of, has to do with what kind of steel or material that you're welding,
Beth Elliott 21:30
Okay, so you have to have the type of wire to go with the type of steel.
Brandon Ellis 21:35
That’s right. So, what we were doing when we were MIG welding the steel on those brackets, you could not use that same wire to weld aluminum.
Beth Elliott 21:48
Because it wouldn't stick.
Brandon Ellis 21:50
They just don't go together. And so, you would need aluminum wire to weld aluminum. Because what you're doing is... In a MIG application, specifically, in a MIG application, there's different types of welding: arc welding, stick welding, TIG welding, I put those two in the same categories,
Beth Elliott 22:10
Stick and TIG.
Brandon Ellis 22:12
Stick and TIG. TIG welding, you're actually creating a spark, if you will, an arc between the material and electrode on the end of the welder. And that gets the material really hot, and it becomes molten, it creates a puddle. And then you have just a little stick of the same type of material, aluminum if it's aluminum, steel if it's steel, that you just dab in, and as it melts, you begin to fill, add more material, more metal, and it goes from liquid, when you get away, it goes back to solid, and you've blended it together. Stick welding means we put the electricity on the thing that’s... Your stick in this case. So, there's an arc between the end of the stick and the material, but it's also melting away the stick because you're passing current through that into the part, remember the part is grounded.
Beth Elliott 23:12
I hope so.
Brandon Ellis 23:15
And so, yeah, it has to be grounded, you got to complete the circuit. And so, in MIG welding, which is usually for steel, that's what we were doing. But it can be for aluminum. And also, for stainless, you just use a different type of gun, but it's really controlling how you control the wire, what we call the wire that's coming out, we're actually charging the wire, it's according to how you're doing it. Sometimes you charge the wire positively and you ground the part, sometimes you put the charge on the part and ground the wire, it still has to be one or the other. But when that wire, just like stick welding, when the wire touches the grounded part, you create a short circuit, basically, and it becomes molten, and there's a lot of heat. There's also, there's two ways to do standard MIG welding, you can have gasless or gas, in our case we're using a shielding gas. So, what that means is you have something there that keeps it kind of in control. And so, the shielding gas doesn't let oxygen come in so that you just end up with a bunch of bad stuff in your weld. So, it becomes more of a burning at that point as opposed to welding if you don't have the shielding gas. Just makes a mess. And so shielding gas goes around it, so it's coming out of the nozzle on this graphic. But this little thing that says welding electrode. That is the wire.
Beth Elliott 24:37
Oh, on the end of it, okay.
Brandon Ellis 24:39
And so, when that wire touches the grounded or positively charged, opposite charged material, it's a short circuit and everybody's kind of seen a short circuit, right? It's like a lightning bolt. I mean, it creates an arc. So, you're controlling that arc that's heating up your materials that you're coming into contact with very quickly, it's also turning the wire into molten material, and then begin to blend. That's how you weld, you’re blending metals together. So, you're not burning them. You're melting them and they flow together. Okay. And so that's how this works. Now let's go to another graphic here.
Brandon Ellis 25:37
Okay, so this is just another view. And you can see the electrode wire, the shielding gas there, the weld metal and all that. And so, the welding arc that it's kind of, I didn't draw this picture, so shout out to whoever did, but it is creating this arc. And that's kind of what's going on. The wire is the key, okay, the wire, the electrode wire is... What type of wire it is, has to match the material that you're welding. So, when we're doing that with the robot, we may have to have an end of arm tool change.
Beth Elliott 26:13
Oh, okay. So, with a quick end of arm tool change?
Brandon Ellis 26:17
It can be quick changing and usually this goes through back to the... It has to also work in terms of the welder, whoever is supplying the automation welder. So usually, we use... There are companies that make automation grade welders for robotic welding. When they're doing tool changes, they have to know what's going on, because there's also different settings that come up. So how fast you're feeding the wire, what's the amperage that's going through, those kinds of things. If you're... Suddenly, if you're welding thick material, and then suddenly, you're welding really thin material, you have to turn your amperage down, because it'll just be too much heat for the thin material, and it'll just disintegrate. And so, remember, you don't want it to just disintegrate, you don't want to burn it. You want it to flow and just be in a molten state, in a controlled molten state. And that's Brandon's vantage point of welding. So hopefully that's helpful, but that's what's happening. I wanted the graphic here for those watching the video, to kind of see what we're talking about, if you're not that familiar with a welding gun. Okay, so back to us.
Beth Elliott 27:30
So, why isn't it reasonable for folks to get a robot and off the shelf welder?
Brandon Ellis 27:37
Well, we were using an off the shelf welder, yeah, just a manual welder. It's not a reasonable thing. So, what we did, and don't do this, this is some of the things that crazy experts can do. And we are crazy experts. I took just one of our standard welders, off the shelf standard welders, and that's a manual welder, it's got the trigger on it on the handle. And so, it's for manual MIG welding. And I bypassed the trigger part and let that go down into the robot. We also had a, just because we're safe, we had a little override button as well. Just because if something didn't go right, I didn't want to mess up my welder. Or my robot. Those are the things that you have to do, that we had to do because of that. It's not feasible, it's not something you want to stick in.
Beth Elliott 28:34
Well, Todd had to sit there and hold it.
Brandon Ellis 28:38
That was my safety. So, if we saw something going wrong, he’d let go and it would extinguish the arc. Because you have to... An automation grade welder, okay, is going to do things like, number one, arc sensing. So, I talked about how the wire touches the part and it turns into an arc, well, robots don't have eyes, typically, and so it doesn't know if maybe the part shifted or something. And suddenly, you know, usually if a welder is going along and they get too far away or something's not right and the weld extinguishes, they know, oops, gotta stop, go back, you know, hook up with where I left off and continue on, do something, right? The robot wouldn’t know unless the welder can tell it. And so, with automation grade welders, they have arc sensing, so they can tell if the arc extinguishes or not.
Beth Elliott 29:37
And alert the operator?
Brandon Ellis 29:41
The robot, alert the robot. And then the robot can act on it in some way. They monitor wire feed, to make sure you're not out of wire.
Beth Elliott 29:49
Yeah, that would be important.
Brandon Ellis 29:51
That your consumables are good, so your gas isn't getting too low or empty. I mean, all that kind of stuff comes into play. The rope that the welder an automated welder can do, and then can collaborate with the robot or tell the robot what’s going on. The other thing that they offer are some cool little things for what I call gun prep. The MIG gun or... Whether you're doing MIG or spooler or whatever, you need so much wire sticking out the end, if it's too much you can't get down to where you're supposed to on your part. And robots don't know that that’s sticking out. So, a lot of times before you start a part or every so many parts or something like, a robot may come into this thing, and it may even be... I've seen some that are really, really, top notch from welding companies that they can sense how long the wire is. But usually, we just move it into a fixed position and there's a cutter that cuts the wire, the wire goes down and it's discarded in some way, it can be cleaned out easily. Those kinds of things, those assemblies are kind of part of what a lot of the robotic welding companies sell. And then the tool change you know, we talked about the gun head changes and stuff like that. Now most of our customers, if you're doing a whole lot of steel, and you're doing just as much aluminum, usually they just do two cells.
Beth Elliott 31:11
So, you don't have to do this change over.
Brandon Ellis 31:15
Because changeover tooling is another cost. But if you're doing... If your throughput requirements are the same, roughly the same, between steel welds and aluminum welds, it justifies having two going at once. Now, if you only do three aluminum parts to 10,000 steel parts, maybe not. But, you know, though, all those things need to be taken into consideration.
Beth Elliott 31:41
So, what considerations need to be made when you're working with an automation company to implement a robotic weld work cell?
Brandon Ellis 31:49
An automation company like elliTek. elliTek Automation Nation, whoo. Well, like I said, don't use an off the shelf welder. You're gonna have to get an automation grade welder, because you need that collaboration between the welder and the robot.
Beth Elliott 32:09
The collaboration meaning that they can work together.
Brandon Ellis 32:12
That they can talk. So again, if the welder says “okay, everything's good”, and then the robot starts to weld and while it's in the middle of the weld, the welder says everything looks good. If the arc extinguishes, if the wire runs out, if the gas runs out, if something goes wrong, and causes that arc to go away or not be able to make a good weld, you need to let the robot know so the robot can stop. What you don't want is, you don’t want to keep feeding wire and it not be part of a weld. Those kinds of things. And you also don't want to make bad parts. So, you need to have that collaboration, that's what I'm talking about. They need to have connectivity, even if it's just discrete I/O. You need to have some type of connectivity. You can also have some programming interfaces if they're partnered in with the robots, but that really comes down to the robot manufacturer working with the welder. Which the other point is robot manufacturing has to say welding is okay with my robot, there's many out there that say, you know, you will void the warranty if you try to hook a welder up to this robot. So, you really need to work with a company that knows their stuff. They know these go together. And then the thing I've seen the most is manufacturers say you can spot weld with this robot. Spot welding is different from MIG type welding with aluminum, stainless, or standard steel, because all those are running a charge through a wire, into a part that is either positively or negatively charged. Spot welding... think of very, very large tweezers. And when I say tweezers, you know, they come out and they kind of come down to a point on either side. So, when you squeeze them, those two points come together. What we do in spot welding, and you can do this on a robot. In fact, you see it a lot in the videos, we don't have any videos of this, but if you see videos of the car manufacturers with the robots coming in, and all of a sudden, you see a bunch of sparks fly, usually that's spot welding. Now, two sides of your tweezers, one side is positive, one side is ground, you know, so opposite charges, and they're squeezing between two pieces of metal and then when they pass that current it's kind of a quick pass of current. It's heating up the two pieces of metal between the fingers. But the electricity is really only passing between that little piece between the two fingers. That's your positive and negative. When you're doing MIG type welding, the gun is where it is, and the part is where it is and they’re the different charges. So, if for some reason you did not ground it properly, you could, the electricity could decide that the shortest path to ground is through all the motors and sensors and encoders and all the other position sensors and everything through the robot.
Beth Elliott 35:20
Oh dear.
Brandon Ellis 35:21
And that's why it needs to be designed for such. So, Hanwha does do that. That's the reason we're using the Hanwha for welding. As does Yaskawa Motoman and FANUC; they're set up for that as well. But there's some out there that are not. You need to check with your manufacturer, you don't want to void your warranty, you certainly don't want to fry a robot.
Beth Elliott 35:43
No, certainly not when you're trying to save some money.
Brandon Ellis 35:47
The other thing you need to take into consideration is safety, we talked about that briefly. You know, industrial robots always have to be guarded, collaborative robots, while they tend to lend themselves to welding applications, because welding is typically slow, you still have that movement to and from, you've got things you got to do there, and you're still got to do a safety analysis on that as well. I think the guarding can be less substantial, or again safety scanners and things of that nature. But you're gonna have to have some kind of guarding safety, that has to come into consideration. And then one of the other things I said is work with a quality, quality automation company and automation experts such as...
Beth Elliott 36:24
elliTek.
Brandon Ellis 36:26
elliTek. www.ellitek.com. But that's basically it. Hey, throw that video back up.
So elliTek presents, the Hanwha HCR-5A welding application, featuring Todd Ader. So yeah, the video kind of started, it actually moved down to that... I was there when it happened. I was cheering it on. It actually did move down to the part, but the video has been edited a little bit to be shortened.
Beth Elliott 37:03
You couldn't see it.
Brandon Ellis 37:05
Oh, you couldn't? Yeah. I see. So, we're gonna work on the camera angles. But certainly, you can see what's going on. And Todd, just kind of watching it lay down there. That's exciting. So, if you're not getting to see the video.
Beth Elliott 37:16
Oh, it's up on YouTube. It’s already posted on YouTube.
Brandon Ellis 37:21
Well, good. So now you're kind of seeing it. And then there's a shot of it after cooldown there. The parts that we made, so yeah, Hanwha robotics, so shout out to them. I love their robots. Man. It's so easy. And again to set that…
Beth Elliott 37:36
Todd’s not a programmer. He's not a controls engineer.
Brandon Ellis 37:39
So, I had my welder who hates PCs, I had my sales engineer out there, and myself. And we set that whole thing up, and we did that weld in less than five minutes. And that really is fantastic. That's the exciting part.
Beth Elliott 38:00
It's not boring at all.
Brandon Ellis 38:02
No, it's not boring, especially when you can make fire. Hey, guys, I want to thank you very much for joining us for today's podcast. Again, we've just been having a ball doing this and so the video is gonna add even more.
Beth Elliott 38:13
It's gonna add another dimension.
Brandon Ellis 38:16
That's right. We'll have costumes, who knows?
Beth Elliott 38:19
Halloween is coming. So, I want to see you with hair.
Brandon Ellis 38:24
Yeah, there you go. The mullets are making a comeback, you know?
Beth Elliott 38:32
Yeah, there's two kids in Knoxville, Tennessee, that are in competition for the best mullet. There was a gentleman in Campbell County, just up the road from here that won for the adults.
Brandon Ellis 38:48
He won? Hey. The mullet. That's the mullet tune right there. So, yeah, who knows what we'll do. Whatever we'll have fun no matter what.
Beth Elliott 39:05
Thank you for joining us. And thank you, Brandon, for your insights.
Brandon Ellis 39:09
Well, okay, so call us. 865 409 1555, if we can help you, call. Check out our website. www.ellitek.com. And of course, we're all over LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Beth Elliott 39:33
I think that's it. Yeah, that's that's it right now. Yeah.
Brandon Ellis 39:37
And we're on video, coming to you live. Live action. So, thank you very much again for joining us, leave us comments. If you like what you hear, smash that like button and subscribe to the channel. Give us a five-star rating in the Apple.
Beth Elliott 39:54
And if you think that somebody might like or enjoy this program, share it, let them know about it.
Brandon Ellis 40:01
And keep those comments coming, we love talking with you. And again, big shoutout to elliTek Automation Nation down at Melbourne, Australia, and across this great globe.
Beth Elliott 40:12
Absolutely
Brandon Ellis 40:13
Guys, thank you very much, have a great day. We’ll see you.
Beth Elliott 40:15
See you, Brandon. See you, everybody.
