At Kinetic Technologies, we know there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to excellent automation. Every shop’s processes, parts, and people present unique challenges, requirements, and capabilities. Before we design and build custom welding fixtures, we dig deep to thoroughly understand your company’s precise needs. This two-part series will outline everything you should know about obtaining custom welding fixtures from Kinetic.
With your answers to 10 key questions, we can begin the detailed work of crafting a custom cobot welding fixture that does the work you want—the way you want it.
Every customer has their own reasons for commissioning a custom welding fixture. Identify your main goal, and we’ll prioritize solutions to match.
Manual layouts are typically quite forgiving, but welding fixtures must be designed specifically for your actual upstream process. If your parts often vary by 16”, for example, that factor influences our fixturing design. With accurate information, we can develop your fixture to accommodate any inconsistencies.
It’s not all that uncommon for a manufacturer to work primarily from paper drawings. If you don’t have any CAD data or 3D models of your assemblies, we’re happy to reverse engineer and create 3D models of your parts. CAD data gives us the dimensional details required to accurately customize your cobot welding fixture.
Different fixturing requirements apply to different welding processes. Are you MIG welding? TIG welding? Is a robot doing the work? Then, of course, there are numerous process versions to consider: globular spray, CV spray, pulse, mag CMT, short circuit, and more. A fixture tailored for a single process may not support a different process should you make changes later on, so we want to know all the ways you intend to utilize your fixture before getting started.
It’s important for us to know any weld specifications and callouts, like bead length and width. One current Kinetic customer employs an internal weld inspection process that exceeds most AWS standards! This level of particularity ensures exceptional part quality, but it also demands welding fixtures advanced enough to accommodate the processes necessary for achieving critical weld callouts. For instance, if the weld callouts require multi-pass welding, the robot and the fixture must work in tandem to provide the best quality weld.
Parts requiring watertight or extremely strong welds necessitate highly specialized fixturing. For instance, one of our customers makes a part for off-road, safety-critical, industrial use, so their fixturing must adequately secure each part throughout a heavy-duty welding process intended to prevent cracking.
Some customers don’t have a preference; they can weld flat, vertical, uphill, and overhead. Others adhere to weld specifications that dictate a single welding orientation, meaning we may need to develop their welding fixtures with uniquely tailored positioners.
To facilitate a quality arc and a strong weld, the welding fixture must be appropriately grounded. We ensure reliable earth grounding by designing grounding points into the fixture—and let’s not forget the positioner! We learned the hard way how a positioner’s lifespan can be truncated by a poorly grounded fixture.
During the early stages of developing our RT1 cobot welding table, an arc shot through the ungrounded fixture and actually extracted the table’s nitride splatter resistance!
Corrosion points exist wherever arc flash emits from the base materials into the fixture. To protect against that corrosion, the fixture must be grounded through the table, directly on the part, or with strong contacts that connect directly to the bar.
Tell us your current grounding process if you have one; either way, we’ll make sure your fixture includes an easy grounding method so you don’t make the same mistake we made!
For customers seeking to scale a welding fixture’s productivity, we recommend incorporating automated clamping mechanisms into the fixture’s design. Equipping a fixture with auto-clamping does increase its upfront cost—sometimes significantly—but you’ll quickly recover your investment through gains in part volume and automation goals.
Kinetic’s automated clamps are designed to handle electromagnetic interference (EMI), arc current, corrosive gases, intense infrared light, heat, and flame. From design to delivery, we emphasize doing the work correctly the first time around to ensure uninterrupted quality and safety from every product, for every customer.
The size of your average production run influences your fixture’s design. As you can imagine, a few hundred parts per month impacts a fixture’s longevity significantly less than several thousand parts per month! When we know your quantities, we can make informed decisions on clamping styles, materials, and other critical aspects of the fixture.
As manufacturers, we tend to discuss robotics and automation as distant concepts from a far-off future. But the truth is that “tomorrow’s” technological advancements are here now, and they’re currently revolutionizing our day-to-day work!
Kinetic’s 10 key questions may seem tedious and basic, but that’s because automation is not science fiction. It’s real, it’s complex, and when it’s done right, automation can radically improve your shop’s success!
Join the robotics revolution with a welding fixture built to suit your shop’s specialty services.