National Manufacturing Week 1988 Show

Citation

(1998), "National Manufacturing Week 1988 Show", Assembly Automation, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.1998.03318cab.004

National Manufacturing Week 1988 Show

National Manufacturing Week 1988 Show

Keywords Assembly, Manufacturing

The new, expanded, McCormick Place in Chicago, IL, was the was host to the four-in-one industrial trade show, National Manufacturing Week, attended by more than 65,000. The show featured automated assembly systems and related components, material handling, as well as industrial design, industrial enterprise management and plant engineering products and services. More than 125 seminars and workshops on issues such as the year 2000 problems, strategies for design and manufacturing in the twenty-first century accompanied the exhibition.

IBM, Manufacturing Technology Center in Boca Raton, FL, exhibited its capabilities for developing and supplying systems for micro-manufacturing to customers. The firm is making available to customers its internal development capabilities to design and build advanced automated assembly systems for micro device production, semiconductor production and automated test systems and electronic production equipment. Services include automated assembly systems, material handling, machine loading and packaging systems for computer memories, electronics and mechanical applications.

The "Hummingbird" ultra-fast test probing system was one example of systems capabilities being presented. This unique system can make as many as 50 test functions per second within a 12mm work envelope. IBM is working to increase the work envelope to 25mm.

Another IBM system capability introduced at the show was an advanced automated assembly system for production of troy embedded hearing improvement devices. The hearing device is connected to the human ear with hair-like conductors. The entire device is so small it can be hidden in the ear canal.

Another custom automated system builder exhibiting was Comtal Machine and Engineering of St Paul, MN. Comtal is a designer of high-speed assembly systems, laser marking and welding units, material handling systems and web processing lines.

A major European producer, Festo, exhibited a full line of pneumatic devices and grippers. Festo also displayed its new embedded Allen-Bradley licensed PLC smart manifold unit. Festo becomes the first company licensed to produce an Allen-Bradley PLC as a part of a third party product. The unit offers a full-function PLC as a part of the manifold system. Programming and I/O are accomplished with Allen-Bradley furnished items.

Schunk GmbH displayed a line of lightweight assembly grippers, produced in rugged plastic rather than the more traditional aluminum. The plastic gripper offers a lower mass, resulting in faster place-to-place movement, small drive motors and reduced support structural requirements. For applications such as electronics product, where light loads are the norm, the plastic gripper offer significant advantages over the metal type.

Other gripper companies displaying at this show included Robohand, a unit of Dover Resources, Zaytran and Numatics.

Item GmbH and its North American agent, MB Kit Systems Ltd introduced a new economy line of modular structural aluminum elements for fabrication into machine structures, work stations and safety guards. Modular structural elements for automated assembly system construction were also displayed by Robert Bosch and Item Products, of Houston. Robert Bosch has unified three operating units in the USA to offer fluid power products, industrial controls and factory automation products from a single sales and support unit. The new unit will be known as Bosch Automation Technology, with headquarters in Racine, WI.

Computer simulation of automated assembly was featured by Autosimulations of Bountiful, UT, a unit of Daifuku, the Japanese material handling giant. Complete assembly systems, manufacturing lines or material handling systems can be designed and tested in simulated operation in the computer before any construction is started. Conflicts or bottlenecks in material flow, sub-system cycle time limitations or other operations can be checked and resolved in the computer.