Custom robots deliver the goods at Electrolux Adelaide plant

At a time when Australian manufacturing industry is confronted with substantial challenges, an innovative custom designed automation system is delivering significant productivity benefits for an Adelaide manufacturer.

Leviathan Design, in the Melbourne suburb of Rowville, has designed, manufactured and installed an automated cell to bond metal trim and plastic columns to a glass panel to form a door outer assembly used in free standing household cookers manufactured by Electrolux Home Products in Adelaide.

The Adelaide factory, which employees some 450 people, produces around 1300 cookers per day including Electrolux, Westinghouse and Chef brand names.

Leviathan Design has in-house machining facilities capable of producing all components required for the system. These were designed in 3D CAD and the model was used directly by the company's CNC machines to produce the components. This ensured that the company had complete control from design through to the manufacturing process.

Sales engineer at Leviathan Design, Glenn Westonsmith, points out that the automated production cell designed for Electrolux is extremely compact, with seven ABB robots all working together in the one cell, which is very unusual.

"A critical requirement of the project was to achieve a cycle time of 14 seconds. A full computer simulation using ABB's Robot Studio software was used to show the proposed system capability," he said. "This simulation was continually updated and tested throughout the project to check the cycle time."

The oven doors are constructed of three parts: painted glass sheets supplied in stacks, plastic injection molded columns provided in trays, and powder coated or stainless trim placed by hand onto the conveyor. Main elements of the automated production system are the robot oven door bonding cell, overhead link conveyor, and the robot storage buffer.

A key task of the robot oven door bonding cell is glass separation and paper removal. The glass sheets tend to stick together due to vacuum between the sheets, but this issue was solved by gripping the glass stack so that the top sheet can be removed by robot without the second sheet sticking.

Paper removal is provided by a high velocity fan creating a vacuum to suck the paper away to a hopper. Westonsmith says it is critical that glass and trim is accurately aligned for assembly of the doors, so glass and trim are placed on 'air tables' to provide a frictionless surface.

"Small holes release air to provide a flotation cushion so that friction between the glass and the table is reduced to almost zero. This ensures that the glass and trim consistently align to a datum position," he explained.Click on their website careel-laser-engraving-machine for more information.

RODE Microphones: the sound of success

THE STORY of how RODE Microphones got its name hearkens back to its earliest days. Founder Peter Freedman started the company in the 1980s by disassembling Chinese capacitor microphones and replacing the electronics inside to yield better performance.

After a particularly successful day demonstrating the product at a convention, the team noted that the microphones were taking off “like a rat up a drain pipe”, which eventually led to the name “Rodent”.

Freedman then arrived at the final form of the brand, RODE, by replacing the O with the minuscule O in tribute to his roots in Sweden, and separating the latter “NT” part of the word to use as a designated prefix for his range of microphones.

Today, RODE Microphones is a name known throughout the global home recording, cinematography and professional sound and music recording markets. All its manufacturing is done at its facility in Silverwater, NSW, and it employs 200 people world-wide.

 In addition to its headquarters in Silverwater, RODE Microphones has a design and marketing studio in Surry Hills, an office in Santa Barbara in the US, and an adjunct facility in Seattle, dedicated to R&D for the Event line of studio monitors, which RODE bought in 2006.

The success of the company today is due largely to the drive of Freedman and his staff, their dedication to the world of sound equipment, and his ability to build a business and a highly competent team, as well as a rare dedication to quality Australian manufacturing.

 Freedman Electronics started out importing German sound equipment from DYNACORD, and Peter took over the company after his father passed away in 1987. Hoping to expand the company, Freedman borrowed large sums of money in the late 1980s, but then the stock market crash hit.

“I ended up owing a fortune, lost the business, lost my house, lost everything,” Freedman said. “I was looking for ways to try and make money. It was just being at the right place at the right time, trying things. I had access to a recording microphone which we sourced, and modified.”

Freedman managed to catch the wave of modern home and digital recording. RODE Microphones catered to the home users who wanted better microphones, but without the exorbitant costs associated with traditional German units.

From this early success, RODE Microphones continued building on its capabilities, developing its own products, even collaborating with the CSIRO and academic and industry physicists to push the boundaries of what it could do in the area of sound.

 “A lot of accountants told us that you could get things in China for very low cost, the labour is great, and people want to supply. Even today, we have great relationships with people over there,” Freedman told Electronics News.

“But I could see that companies there were going to eventually want to do their own thing. And some of the ones that I was talking to did go on to try and do their own brands.”

To protect his company, Freedman started investing in machinery 16 years ago, gradually building up a formidable arsenal of manufacturing equipment, which allowed him to bring more operations in-house.

 “It’s taken 15 years of learning how to use the machinery, getting the staff and buying these very high tech machines to get to where we are now,” he said. “I have machines that make labour irrelevant. People ask me about low cost labour, and I say I don’t care, I’ve got no labour in some of the stuff we make.”

But it’s not just about the gear: staff training and know-how is the glue that keeps the model together.

“That’s the secret of Australian manufacturing: high tech machinery and very clever people,” Freedman said. “People think you can just turn on manufacturing by money. You can’t. It takes ages to train people to the point where they understand it. We’ve got many people here who’ve been at it nine or ten years or more.”