A 13.4 m painting seventh axis built for an Italian robot manufacturer
A single-carriage seventh axis for an Italian robot manufacturer's panel painting line: 13,360 mm overall, 11,700 mm effective travel, 1 m/s, carriage load ≤1,000 kg, repeatability ±0.2 mm, matched to GR6150-2900 and GR6100 hollow-wrist robots. Delivered 45 days after deposit, EXW, in euros, with drawings approved by the customer's engineering department.
The problem the customer brought
Not enough skilled operators, a manual process that was hard to manage, and finish quality that was hard to control.
Workpiece
The customer's own panel painting line: booth 15,050 mm long × 5,010 mm wide, 1,800 mm between robot and workpiece, workpieces up to 6,000 mm long.
Robots
Component supply only — one seventh-axis linear track (single carriage). Servo motors and the control cabinet were in the customer's scope.
Process and equipment
Welded main frame 13,360 mm long — cut and welded, vibration stress relief, two high-temperature tempering cycles, rough and finish machining on a CNC gantry mill, shot blasting and paint to RAL 6018 — plus transfer carriage, gearbox mounting plate and limit blocks, two anti-collision devices, cable-carrier trough and SUS304 guideway covers. Drive: FASTON HAB-142-25 planetary helical gearbox, J&T module 3 helical rack 29 × 29 to grade 7 over 13 m, and a module 3, 45-tooth helical pinion. Guidance: HIWIN GH45 rails, 26 m, with four blocks. WHALE KQ65 × 200 × R150 × 7,800 cable carrier; Pulsarlube explosion-proof automatic lubrication; two P+F NJ5-18GW-N limit switches.
Commercial terms
Lead time 45 days after deposit, EXW; payment 50/50 in euros; warranty 12 months; sea packing in three sections and two wooden crates.
Shipping terms on current projects: EXW, FOB, CIF or DAP. Customer names, plant locations and prices are not published.
Result
Delivered. The order required that the carriage drawings be issued by us and submitted to the customer's engineering department for approval, and their technical manager released them after review. The concluded order came to about 0.82 times the first quotation.
What we do differently because of this project
When supplying components to a robot manufacturer, drawing approval sits with them: the hours for design, submission and revision go into the quotation, and the number of approval rounds and the response deadline go into the order terms. Packing is also material at component level — three sections in two crates was a meaningful share of the cost — so the packing scheme is quoted at the same time, not added afterwards.
Photographs from this project
Customer names, plant identification and location watermarks are removed. Captions state where an image is a general illustration rather than this customer's plant.
