Car-body interior painting — four robots on two 11 m linear tracks, with door openers
Body-in-white interior painting with four CMA GR6150-2900 robots on two 11 m seventh-axis tracks: on each track one inverted robot opens the hood, front, sliding and swing doors while the second paints. Delivered 6–8 weeks after deposit, with the whole station pre-assembled and function-tested in China.
The problem the customer brought
An ageing paint shop that needed modernising.
Workpiece
Interior surfaces of body-in-white, with robot door openers for hood, front door, sliding door and swing door.
Robots
4 × CMA GR6150-2900 (painting M-type cabinet, IP54, B&R control; 2 left-hand and 2 right-hand) on two 11 m linear seventh axes — one inverted robot opening, one floor-mounted robot painting per track.
Process and equipment
Seventh axis: 14 m overall X length, ≥11 m effective travel, 1 m/s, carriage load ≤1,000 kg, repeatability ±0.2 mm, German module 3/4 helical rack, HIWIN 45 guideways, 10:1 planetary gearbox, 5.5 kW explosion-proof servo, Ex cable glands and Pulsarlube explosion-proof lubrication. Application: 55 mm electrostatic bell with dual shaping air and speed control, 4.5 cc gear pump, 5-colour change valve, cleaning block and return-purge block. Civil and steel work: F-type steel structure modification plus a new floor-level N-type structure, a venturi-level steel platform and 304 stainless booth panels. The complete station was pre-assembled and function-tested in China, with one week of training for the customer's team.
Pre-integration and factory acceptance test
Equipment counted against the packing list; safety logic proven, robot paths run, electrical circuits and connections checked, inspection point by point before crating.
Delivery and site work
EXW Wuhu; road transport to the customer. On-site work by the customer's team: 30 days.
Commercial terms
Lead time 6–8 weeks after deposit, EXW.
Shipping terms on current projects: EXW, FOB, CIF or DAP. Customer names, plant locations and prices are not published.
Result
Delivered and executed, with an upper and lower steel structure added during the project; a five-person customer delegation spent a month in China on disassembly, reassembly and programming training. Execution also brought a cluster of quality problems from the robot manufacturer: axis-2 sealed-cover fixing bolts fractured in batches on the exterior-spray robots, the cleaning program took over 9 seconds to load against a customer requirement of under 2 seconds, and software revisions were frequent — six shipped units needed a remote upgrade and seven unshipped units were upgraded free of charge before dispatch.
What we do differently because of this project
The bolt fractures and the load-time overrun were the robot manufacturer's hardware and software defects, but as the middleman we absorbed all of the site pressure. On any comparable interior-painting project the purchase contract now fixes mandatory factory acceptance test items, a frozen software version, a deadline for the root-cause report and the obligation to ship spare parts first.