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Cobot welder delivers 10x production boost

Automation at DeAngelo Marine Exhaust

Watch how the Cobot Welder transformed DeAngelo Marine Exhaust.

In Short

DeAngelo Marine Exhaust had nearly given up automating complex, manual TIG welds until the company came across Hirebotics’ Cobot Welder. The Florida manufacturer of exhaust parts has now been able to increase weld speed tenfold, lower lead times, and improve quality using its new cobot colleague, which also helped DeAngelo break into new markets.

The business transformation

65 days. That’s how far behind DeAngelo Marine Exhaust was on lead times at its worst point. Based in the heart of ‘the yachting capital of the world’ in Fort Lauderdale, FL, DeAngelo is a synonym for aircraft quality welds on marine engine exhaust parts. But demand exceeded the capacity of the company’s labor-intensive production. CEO Justin Montes had no luck hiring more manual welders and was left to face his own worst nightmare: letting down the finest boat builders, naval architects and engine companies in the world by delivering too late.

Montes heard about ‘these cobots’ coming out and started sending out parts to seven of the big robotic welding companies to see if they could do a demo weld. The results were underwhelming. “They were all struggling to match our quality. When I contacted Universal Robots (UR), I was already three months into this and had almost given up,” says the CEO. UR referred Montes to welding partner Hirebotics, a company that has incorporated UR’s collaborative robots into the “The Cobot Welder”; A complete solution that includes the UR10e cobot arm equipped with a welding torch, the Beacon app for teaching, a trusted welding power source, and a versatile welding table to perform high-quality welds on a variety of workpieces.

Hirebotics quickly returned photos of DeAngelo’s parts perfectly welded up with no gaps. Montes visited Hirebotics to see it first-hand as he initially didn’t belive it. When he got there, he was able to teach and run the Cobot Welder in just 20 minutes with no prior robotics experience. “I was running parts like I’ve been running robots my whole life. After that, I gave them a purchase order. And that’s when the fun started,” Montes says.

DeAngelo Marine Exhaust

Industry Metal and Machining

Country USA

Number of Employees 60

Cobot used UR10e

Watch how employees with no prior robotics experience quickly taught the Cobot Welder – an intuitive process that won over some of their more skeptical colleagues.

How they did it

Dive into some key details of the automation project at DeAngelo Marine Exhaust

From 2 to 20 inches per minute

The Cobot Welder has quickly enabled the company to catch up on lead times and reduce defect rates. “We went from being eight weeks over capacity back to baseline in a matter of days,” says Montes. He attributes this accomplishment to the speed of the cobot that MIG welds 20 inches per minute compared to the 2-5 inches per minute when TIG welded manually.

No programming knowledge required

Nobody at DeAngelo Marine Exhaust had any experience with robotics programming before the arrival of the Cobot Welder. “We still have World War II machines running every day on our production floor. So just the thought of a “ROBOT” would be enough to send some of our folks to a therapist,” says CEO Justin Montes. “But the ease of use is truly remarkable. Within 20 minutes of uncrating our cobot, we were running parts.”

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting with Hirebotics is instantaneous through the Cobot Welder’s Beacon app, which also allows operators to take pictures and submit directly through the support chat. “Our production manager is an old dog who did not want to learn any new tricks,” says De Angelo Marine Exhaust’s CEO Justin Montes. “We took a picture, sent it to the chat, received a response and it worked. It blew him away.”

Hirebotics' Cobot Welder

The Cobot Welder’s Beacon app provides production data in real time.

Adding way points in Beacon, the Cobot Welder’s app-based interface that runs on any handheld device or tablet. “If you want to weld a circle, press circle, click three points—it knows that it needs to weld a circle along those three points. You want to do a line? Two points, it’s that easy,” explains Montes, who is working on fixtures that will enable the Cobot Welder to weld 25-50 products in the same cycle.

Easy teaching with The Cobot Welder’s Beacon app

Production manager at DeAngelo Marine Exhaust, Camilo Aguilar (right), shows the operator how to ‘teach’ the Cobot Welder. “The operators pick it up quickly when they realize how much easier and faster their job becomes,” says Aguilar who calls the Cobot Welder ‘My Baby.’

Once the operators started toying with the settings, we realized we could get the welds to look however we wanted them to: fat welds, skinny welds, butt joints, lap joints—we are even building fixtures to do seam welding,

Justin Montes - President, CEO & Owner - DeAngelo Marine Exhaust