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A wicked-good solution: Robotic palletizer doubles production at Red Devil

Hand-tool and chemical manufacturer replaces manual palletizing with a robotic system that doubles its capacity and enables it to reassign five full-time workers to less strenuous and tedious jobs.

Red Devil’s new robotic palletizer helps the company achieve a 100 tube/min rate on its caulking line.
Red Devil’s new robotic palletizer helps the company achieve a 100 tube/min rate on its caulking line.

Pryor, OK-based Red Devil, Inc. is a privately owned maker of more than 400 hand tools and chemical products, such as caulk, spackling, and sealants, for professional construction and home maintenance and improvement. Along with its brand-name products, Red Devil manufactures private-label products for some of America’s largest hardware and home center chains.

Red Devil’s manufacturing facility includes semi-automated production lines, which, until recently, terminated with a manual palletizing process. One high-volume line produces, among other things, custom color caulk in tubes for tile grout and backsplashes; the other line produces spackling and sealants in pint-sized cans to gallon-sized pails. Previously, Red Devil employed workers who stood two and three deep at the end of the line lifting and positioning boxes of product weighing up to approximately 30 pounds on pallets. Workers would rotate on the lines to give one another a break. One would palletize, while the other fed the assembly line’s box erector. Each line would run two, 10-hour shifts per day for four days.

“People were getting back injuries, and we struggled to keep running at a pace of boxing 100 tubes per minute,” says Kelly Brown, VP of Engineering for Red Devil. “We were keeping that 100-tubes-per-minute pace about 50 percent of the time.”

Red Devil hoped to reduce injuries and labor costs, while improving the efficiency of its lines. The company wanted its new solution to pay for itself within two years.

“We looked to automate the production lines and deploy our people elsewhere, instead of hiring more people to increase throughput,” says Brown, who adds that hiring an additional staff position for robotic programming was not possible.

Flexible, easy-to-program automation

S&R Robot Systems, LLC, a Yaskawa Motoman integrator, recommended the five-axis Motoman® MPL80 II robot with MLX200 controller platform and PalletSolver® pallet generation software to replace manual palletizing.

The compact base and slim-arm design of the MPL80 II robot is ideally suited for minimum floor-space installation requirements. Its approximately 11-ft reach enables palletizing loads up to 95 in. tall. The robot is equipped with a pneumatic, multi-zone vacuum cup-style gripper assembly, comprising four pneumatic zones, for consistent product holding.

The MLX200 offers a PLC ladder-based programming approach. It enables control of robots and peripheral equipment within a single controls environment like Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC. No special programming language or controller is required. Its simplified hardware and controls architecture eliminates redundant interfaces.

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