October 2020

33 www.drivesncontrols.com October 2020 MACHINE BUILDING n supplied with a rack to drive the carriages via a motorised pinion. Double-row bearings, made in a single piece, were used on the carriages. It was important that the bearings could be re-adjusted easily by hand to remove any play that might develop as a result of wear from the continuous high load. The V-guides achieve this using an eccentric adjustment facility. “The one-piece design ensures no dirt can penetrate into the bearings,” explains Hepco’s German sales manager, Thorsten Pfau. “The V-guide principle also ensures that dirt particles are transferred away from the running surface as the bearings move along the slide. These bearings have high load capacities, especially in the radial direction. In this case, this was of great importance – the mass of the welding robot and carriage is about 220kg.” The Spie team managed to upgrade the welding machine without disrupting production over a period of five months. Work was done out whenever a welding robot was not in use. “The old rails had to be disassembled and the mounting surface fully cleaned so that 5,500 new holes could be drilled for mounting the new guidance system – and all by hand,” Becker recalls. Hepco’s rails are supplied in maximum lengths of 4m, but were joined to achieve the total 30m length of the system. Each rail had to be aligned to ensure a good join between the teeth in the rack and to provide a smooth movement of the carriage across each joint. With the help of a Leica laser surveying tracker, the rails were aligned with a deviation of less than 50μm microns per slide. “The systems are running completely trouble-free,” Becker reports. n The new installation uses around 500m of single-edge slides fitted with racks to drive the carriages XXX FVDIOFS DP VL X Easy mounting, compact housing X Innovative guard locking principle, bistable guard locking X Flexible ball actuator for very small door radii X Industry 4.0 ready through intelligent communication X Hygienic version additionally available Transponder-coded safety switch with guard locking Smart, compact, safe – door locking mechanism CTM