The Family Business - New Machines

In the last series of pictures there were two empty workstations. Those have now been filled by the two new machines. I'm of two minds on these. First I think they are over designed in some ways. They are built from an extruded aluminum instead of steel and feature some nice safety features that you won't find on the other machines. However, they also have a new setup for the wire trays and the electric eye and the compressed air "puffer" are now an integral part of the wire tray and while they look good and are a bit more space efficient they are much harder to adjust properly. 

They are producing acceptable good quality wire but we are having a hard time getting to that point and its really hard to produce the quality of wire that we strive to produce. It may be that the breaking in period is just going to take some time. All of the machines in the shop have their own quirks and we will just have to learn the quirks for these two new machines as well. Personally I wish they had just repeated the design of machines 11, 12 & 13, which are the best runners in the shop.

A look at machine 14. the extruded aluminum material plus the blue safety gates in front of the electric motors (there are two electric motors one for each head, I think all the vintage WWII motors are gone now). There is a new design for the plastic that covers the heads as well. It does look good!

Also not entirely happy with the new design of the feeder wheels. They are almost to heavy and are hard to adjust.

Here you can see the whole machine. Note the extruded aluminum extension to support the wire receiving tray. The posts for the electric eye and the puffer are attached directly to the inner aluminum rail. 

We moved machine 13 into the machine 15 spot. Here you can see how we support the wire receiving tray and the electric eye and puffer on tripod stands. Adjustment is easy, you just kick it with your foot!