CNC Machining for Industrial Automation

Automation equipment is built from parts that have to fit other parts you already own. A base plate for a robot gripper, a mounting bracket for a sensor, a guide rail for a transfer unit: none of these is difficult to machine on its own, and all of them fail in the same way, which is a hole pattern that is a few hundredths out from the pattern on the mating component.

The parts we machine most for this industry are pocketed aluminum plates with dowel and bolt patterns, anodized brackets and bars, rail housings with contoured internal pockets, carrier and nest plates for component arrays, and complete end-of-arm tool assemblies with urethane contact pads and stainless guide fingers. Most are aluminum, finished by anodizing or bead blasting; wear faces are steel or hardened inserts.

What buyers in this industry ask for is not exotic tolerance but consistency: the fifth batch has to interchange with the first, and a replacement part ordered a year later has to bolt on without fitting. That is a drawing-revision and fixture question as much as a machining question, so we keep the program, the fixture and the first-article report of every repeat part together.

Send the assembly drawing or the mating part with the component drawing. The controlling dimensions on an automation part are almost always the ones that locate it against something else, and those are the ones we measure first.