VIDEO: HOW TO Implement Grinding Solutions with Automation

JACOB SANCHEZ:  My travels around the world have given me the extraordinary opportunity to visit a variety of metalworking facilities, and in my travels, I've got to meet a diverse group of business owners and now, the people and the places may be different, but some of the questions stay the same. One of them is, when do I know I can become more productive with automation? How can I increase the effectiveness of my grinding and metal removing solutions? And who can I go to for these automation solutions so I can keep pushing quality products out the door to my customers? I found a few of those answers, if not all, right here at the Norton Saint-Gobain headquarters in Worcester, Mass. You and I, we're going to be going for a ride and learning how to implement grinding solutions with automation.

You guys have an amazing team of people that are actually super customer facing out in the field every day, and they're bringing back feedback to you about what customers are struggling with. What's some of the feedback you've been hearing on a daily basis?

BRAD HERAGHTY: The biggest thing we hear is, number one is how do you optimize your process? How do you optimize that application? Right. So we're here, we're at our R&D facility, and we have the APS Lab, which we talked about. And this touches on really optimizing that process. This takes the risk from the customer. And we say, hey look, we have a solution. We have a process. Come check this out. We think there's a place for this. So again, we de-risk proof of concept and we really help with the integration side of it as well.

JACOB SANCHEZ: And that's a perfect segue to you talking about a brand new product getting unveiled, getting created by your R&D team based on all of this feedback from your team. And it developed and it turned into a new product that you guys have now.

JAMIE REALE: As manufacturing processes evolve, you know, as an abrasives manufacturer, we need to make sure we're meeting those customer challenges. And that was really the story behind the new Norton Razor Star product, which we recently launched in January. Yeah. So we we looked at what customers were seeing. We looked at their challenges and we wanted to develop a product that was going to meet those challenges of higher productivity, efficiency, and long product life are some of the key features that are part of this new product. We've got some great resources available and we're excited to, you know, get the word out there. That's why you're here.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Well I'm ready to meet the team again. See a new face, Andrew, who's a new team member that I haven't got to meet in that lab. I heard they got something new for me. Where it's not just about bringing a part to an abrasive, but we're actually going to be bringing in abrasive to a part. So I'm really interested in seeing that.

Last time I was here at the Norton Saint-Gobain HQ at the EPS lab for Season 1, we talked about how to know if automation is right for you. And this episode, it feels like a sequel to that. We're diving in now to how to implement grinding solutions with automation and with the new topic comes a new face. Andrew, how's it going, brother?

ANDREW BIRO: Very good.

JACOB SANCHEZ: You weren’t with this team last time we were here in the lab. Can you give me a rundown who you are, what you do here with Norton?

ANDREW BIRO: Sure. So I'm the engineering group leader here at the APS lab. I'm based here in Northborough. A lot of what I do and what we do here is, is to really focus on providing automation abrasive solutions to our customers, really trying to de-risk the problems that they're having and show them that automation is a good path forward.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Happy to have you.

ANDREW BIRO: Thank you.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Tony, a man that needs no introduction, but I want you to give one anyway.

TONY LANDES: So, Tony Landes, and I am the commercial manager for the APS group.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Aging like fine wine over here, Nate. How’s the programming going brother?

NATHAN JACKSON: Doing good. We've been throwing a lot of sparks and, excited to share what we've learned with you all.

JACOB SANCHEZ: We got a new topic and it's how to implement brightening solutions with automation. And when it comes to this new wheel I'm seeing over here, how did this come from a customer to your R&D team to the APS lab to be a solution that you're now providing?

ANDREW BIRO: This actually is, our new Razor Star product. So a lot of the challenges that our customers were facing related to cycle time, so this was a product specifically designed to attack that issue.

Right? So there's a specifically designed brain. It looks like a Razor Star or Ninja star, as we call it, and we basically have designed a product where we have a very, very high percentage of the grain standing upright. And with those grains standing upright we can control the force per grip really well, we can maximize the amount of material removal that we get with this product.

JACOB SANCHEZ: And how do you know when you need to go from this to this?

TONY LANDES: So when we developed, you know, more efficient, better products, premium products, you need to match that with the right tool. This tool is something that an operator can handle for multiple hours at a time, but if you want to get the maximum efficiency out of the product, you really need something like this four horsepower unit. But how long did you actually run that tool?

JACOB SANCHEZ: I can barely hold it now. This is nuts.

NATHAN JACKSON: Most of what we do in the lab here is kind of helping our customers dial in their automation processes, getting the right parameters. Right. And that's why we talk about compliance so much. Because that force you're using is critical for any abrasives.

So one of the things I've kind of learned in the lab, as as much as a person can get a lot done, this is a fine tool. But when you put this on a belt form and put it in a robotic cell, I've gone upwards of over 100 pounds of force and still not seeing diminishing returns. So this abrasive can handle very high force and get significantly higher MRR than any human can get with one of these tools.

JACOB SANCHEZ: We're taking everything you just heard here, putting it together, putting it on a robot in a cell, in a solution and making it happen.

So this time our part is fixtured up. And so what's the difference between having our material stationary and our head do the feedback rather than vice versa?

NATHAN JACKSON: So in this case, when it's a larger part, you're typically gonna want to put the belt on the end of the robot arm, because if the belt, or the part is too large to pick up, then you're going to want to fixture the part somewhere and have the robot bring the tooling over to it.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Now, we're actually going from what you saw earlier was taking the abrasion to the part. Now we're taking the part to the abrasion. Nate, is that correct? What are we about to see happen?

NATHAN JACKSON: Yeah. So in this case we're going to be picking up a bar of steel, and we're going to be plunging it into this belt here. And this is a good example of when the compliance is actually on the belt head in this case. So we have some hardened steel right here about to go into that head that is adjustable. That is sweet. So far. Is the amount of sparks that we're seeing because we're using like this new roughing style abrasive?

ANDREW BIRO: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. I mean, you can see that that's sort of tied directly to how efficiently we're removing material off that part, right? The more sparks that you can see there coming off every one of those is a chip right? Every one of those is a chip coming off of that workpiece, right?

JACOB SANCHEZ: Can you put that data like in your program so it can store it as it's doing the test and stuff?

NATHAN JACKSON: Yeah, definitely. We provide a pretty comprehensive report that tells you everything we learned in here working with the customer.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Nice. I appreciate you guys doing this for your customers. For our industry. This means a lot, and it's changing the way that we innovate and create solutions for our customers. Thank you to the amazing team here at Norton Saint-Gobain for letting me come in yet again. Because now, all of us, this industry, we know how to implement grinding solutions with automation.

Narrator: For more metalworking tips and industry best practices, stay tuned for the next How To episode, and subscribe to the MSC Industrial Supply YouTube channel. A source of original manufacturing content Built to Make You Better.