Servo technology for greater performance

Protecting chair castors saves packaging

Saving on packaging has become a hot topic, even for bulky objects such as office chairs. To make sure these goods reach the customer undamaged, their castors can be protected with plastic caps. It is then sufficient to simply cover the chairs during transport, dispensing with the need for cumbersome cardboard. The chair and furniture castor specialist Gross+Froelich relies on modern automation technology to apply its ring-shaped protective caps. Sigma-7-series servodrives and a SLIO-series controller from Yaskawa play a key role in this process.

Anything that has castors doesn’t have to be carried. Of course, that doesn’t mean that your typical office chair is pushed all the way to the customer, but the chair’s castors can certainly be used to transport them from the truck to the parking lot to the office desk. To ensure that they arrive there without any scratches, however, the castors must be protected. Plastic caps are a good solution for doing so. After transport, they are easy to remove and recycle. But how are the protective caps put on the chair castors?

Up to 36,000 caps per day

A chair castor basically consists of two individual wheels, with a cap pressed onto each. This process is performed fully automatically and at considerable speed. Gross+Froelich in the small town of Weil der Stadt in Germany uses a machine made by ARAMIS Maschinenbau GmbH & Co. KG that now operates with cycle times of 2.4 seconds following its redesign with servo technology. Depending on the castor model, that means that up to 36,000 ring-shaped protective caps are applied fully automatically to the wheels in 24 hours of operation, which are then connected to form the complete castor further on in the assembly process. That’s around 10,000 caps more than the machine managed before the redesign.