2008-10-02 - Eight ABB robots are helping one of the world’s leading manufacturers of home and garden cutting tools achieve maximum flexibility on production lines, sharpen blades with micro-millimeter precision, and reduce Teflon consumption by 30 percent.
By ABB Communications
Finland-based Fiskars manufactures about half a million pairs of scissors, 850,000 axes and hundreds of thousands of gardening tools a year at its factory near Helsinki.
The company is a global market leader in gardening, crafting, houseware and outdoor recreation tools and has an annual turnover of about $830 million. Its many brands include household names like Wilkinson Sword and Kitchen Devils.
High quality – and the successful integration of plastics and steel in its products – is the core of Fiskars’ success, and ABB robots are helping the company build on that strength.
“Our products are unique, not quite in the mainstream, and simply the best cutters in the world.”
- Carl-Olof Holm, technical director, Fiskars.
The eight ABB robots play an integral part in Fiskars’ production process and enable rapid production changeovers, which is important to a company which manufactures almost 30 different kinds of scissors alone.
In the injection molding section they perform close to a dozen tasks at high speed and with millimeter accuracy.
Their tasks range from lifting the handles of gardening tools, feeding them onto the assembly line, labeling them with the Fiskars logo and adding blades and bolts to the handles to complete the finished product.
To create Fiskars scissors, an ABB IRB 140 robot with three-dimensional vision guidance picks blades from a pile, sorts them into pairs and places them at the correct angle for heat treatment at 950°C in an oven.
Another ABB robot sharpens blades with accuracy to within a fraction of a millimeter, and an IRB 540 sprays Teflon onto ax blades, using 30 percent less material than its predecessor.
“Not only is it great for us financially, it’s also made the process safer for our employees and it’s more friendly to the environment,” says Harri Engström, Fiskars.