Steve Meisel
Member
Recently a coworker and I was discussing the "Manual Mode" of our machinery. He feels that in manual mode the machine should move (with the necessary guarding closed) unconditionally. If he wants to extend a slide before raising it, it hits a fixture, and tears up the tooling, then it should happen. (I wonder about him sometimes.)
I told him that the machine should be able to move, but must stay in sequence. I would tend to think that this would be cheaper for the company, easier on the equipment, and give less downtime. Production people tend to be button pushers and not thinkers. On some of our equipment they have actually numbered, with a marker, some of the panel buttons. Doesn't matter why the station went down. They feel that if they push the buttons in the numbered sequence everything will be come back to life.
Things like this tend to tear up machinery and if the person at the helm has no brain at least give the machine one.
Once I installed a pushbutton on a panel and didn't hook it up. Told the operators if they had any problems just push it 2 times. They loved it. Never had a complaint again.
Any thoughts on the subject?
Steve
I told him that the machine should be able to move, but must stay in sequence. I would tend to think that this would be cheaper for the company, easier on the equipment, and give less downtime. Production people tend to be button pushers and not thinkers. On some of our equipment they have actually numbered, with a marker, some of the panel buttons. Doesn't matter why the station went down. They feel that if they push the buttons in the numbered sequence everything will be come back to life.
Things like this tend to tear up machinery and if the person at the helm has no brain at least give the machine one.
Once I installed a pushbutton on a panel and didn't hook it up. Told the operators if they had any problems just push it 2 times. They loved it. Never had a complaint again.
Any thoughts on the subject?
Steve