The challenge was to pick up series of trapezoidal parts cut from a coil and place them in a circular pattern for assembly. The process had to handle over eight trapezoidal parts per second. As the parts were created by making angled cuts across the strip of material the left hand and right hand parts also had to be separated.
The solution was to create a tooling head that utilized segmented tooling – very much like a chain. When the chain was straightened the parts could be picked up from the cutting station. The chain was then coiled up in order to place the parts into the circular pattern that was required. One tooling head was used for the left hand parts while a second tooling head was used for the right hand parts. The two head dictated a mirror image assembly system. One assembly station for the left hand parts and another for the right hand parts.