Industry meets academia as local manufacturer turns to WAMIC for expertise

Industry meets academia as local manufacturer turns to WAMIC for expertise

Hamill Machine’s newest product is a welded, light-weight aluminum rack that can be stacked to hold wine barrels. The company need to transition from a manual to an automatic robotic welding process to keep up with order demand.

In order to keep up with the increasing market demand for its wine barrel aluminum racks, local manufacturer Hamill Machine needed to fully automate its welding process.

Welding had been performed manually on the aluminum racks that can be stacked to hold wine barrels; however, they were not able to supply the racks quickly enough to meet market expansion.

Hamill sought the expertise of the Walker Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre (WAMIC) at Niagara College’s Research & Innovation division.

The challenge was to design a fixture that interfaces with both the robotic cell and the robot welder itself. The WAMIC research team had to design a solution that would accommodate both the technical requirements from an end-user perspective for Hamill, and also from a functional perspective.

Read more about this exciting business venture at ncinnovation.ca.

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