Nissan can, with its press die maintenance mover system 22 February 2010

By investing in a bespoke drive system, Nissan Motor UK now has a more reliable and flexible handling system for moving damaged press dies from production to maintenance bays.

Rob Rolfe, die maintenance team leader at NMUK, explains that the Sunderland site is highly automated, with six transfer press lines producing vehicle body parts, as well as three blanking lines for incoming steel.

Beyond that, he says the press shop uses hundreds of different press tools, but holds no spares (due to lack of space), and the dies themselves weigh from a few to as much as 30 tonnes.

Previously, the plant used a powered trolley system, operating on a guided track and traversing across the press shop on these tracks. This enabled die sets to be positioned and then hoisted, using overhead cranes, into the maintenance bays.

However, reliability was poor. "If a truck broke down, the die sets would sit motionless in the middle of a busy production area until repairs were completed," comments Rolfe.

"MasterMover's solution entailed integrating a MasterTug MT-20 drive onto the outside of our three existing press die trucks," he says. "An operator then drives the trucks via a wired pendant control.

"If there is a fault on the drive, we can quickly detach [it] from the truck by removing a single pin. We then replace the drive with one from the other two, less critical MasterTugs."

For NMUK, MasterMover removed the usual tiller arm from its MT20 and devised a simple coupling system between it and the die truck.

"One of the benefits we have seen from using the MasterTug units is the flexibility they provide. This has improved our reliability considerably," Rolfe confirms.

Brian Tinham

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