This effort was more about education for us and finding ways to increase our production with just two of us here now. A robot arm would have been more valuable to us if we had a higher volume per week. We only produce 20 to 25 of these guards per week, so low volume. It did help to increase our production though. Or shorten the time for assembly that is. Just building a prototype assembly jig made the whole process less fiddly and cut the assembly time in half. That helps.
The research also lead me back to 3D printing again. I had a Prusa that I made several years back. I sold it back then because the technology for it was not there for what we needed.
Now they can print Pet G and Polycarbonates. I bought an XYZ to see how it would work on our dust ports. It is a nice printer that can print with Pet G after a hotend upgrade. It does the job, but is incredibly slow. I would probably need 5 or 6 of those here to keep up with production.
So I started looking at commercial models. I did not like the price tag and material cost on those. I was about to dismiss the idea when I came across the Fusion3 F400.
https://www.fusion3design.com/f400-enclosed-3d-printer/
It has everything I was looking for in a 3D printer.
It is large enough to print several of our dust ports at once. Probably 5 times faster than the XYZ. Much more reliable. And it uses open source filaments. Not a ton of info out there on them, but I liked everything I saw. I ordered one of them and it should be here in a couple weeks.
This can reside in a back room and be producing finished dust ports all by itself. The material cost is about what we pay now for the real thing, but bending these ports by hand is an incredible time consuming and labor intensive operation. Lots of waste too when the don't form quite right.
I felt it was a good move. That frees up my Son of about a day and a half of labor each week. That has to equal increased production. Not only that but doing them by hand means that they were not identical, so there are variations. When printed, they will all be identical. I have also been wanting to put a little led light in them so darker shops might see the cut line better. 3D printing should make that much easier.
I will start a new thread when that arrives. Looking forward to it.