In February 2008, Mitsubishi Motors made the decision to close its Tonsley Park Manufacturing Plant in Adelaide, South Australia. The closure meant that the company’s manufacturing plant and equipment, which included an extensive range of Kawasaki robots, would soon become available.

By early 2009, Mitsubishi had announced its plan to sell the Tonsley Park Plant equipment via an international online auction as well as by negotiated sale. Using a well known auction site as their marketplace, the sale included over 3,000 major assets such as metal stamping lines, hemming presses, automatic robotic welding cells, CNC’s, and a large quantity of 2004 Kawasaki robots and resistance spot welders.

The huge liquidation sale attracted much attention and by the end of March 2009, the second-hand Kawasaki robots and the other assets had quickly found new homes in manufacturing business all over Australia.

The question is though, how many of those businesses who snapped up a great deal on a second hand robot have actually managed to successful integrate that robot into an application?

Leading Kawasaki specialists and Australian agents, Robot Technologies Systems Australia Pty Ltd (RTA) has seen it all too often. A perfectly good second hand robot simply gathering dust because its new owner was unsure of how to correctly implement a solution around it.

So what seemed like a good investment at the time turns out to be a not so good decision, from both a financial and productivity stand point.

But all is not lost. Take an experienced team like RTA with their extensive Kawasaki knowledge; they are the logical choice to help you implement the right solutions around your second hand robot.

RTA Sales and Marketing Manager, Trinton Smith explains that over the years RTA has helped a number of companies reap the rewards of investing in a second hand robotic solution. In fact, Trinton and his team have been instrumental in getting manufactures to understand the myriad of benefits in obtaining robots at a reduced cost.

“Just recently we were commissioned by a customer that had purchased 20 ex-Mitsubishi ZX 165/200 D Controller robots to re-install them at their site as MIG welding robots, these robots are normally used for spot welding and handling etc and not MIG welding but due to the nature of the customers product these robot are ideal as they have the long reach at a very affordable price.” says Smith.

The first step for RTA was to remove the old equipment from the system and give it a check over, “As the robots have been well looked after and regularly serviced by RTA this was not a problem.” explains Smith.

RTA purchased the required welding equipment, directly from Kawasaki and set about re-installing the robots, “We fitted the wire feed system to the top arm, then the torch assembly to the head of the robot all that was needed to fit the torch was an adaptor plate to mount the torch holder. A bracket system was made to hold the wire feed cables etc off the back of the robot. Normally this would go through the external cable loom of the robot, but, as it is a MIG robot, this was not possible as the welding wire conduit needs to be kept as straight as possible.” Smith describes adding that, “The robot cabinet needed to have some of the old boards removed and new welding interface boards fitted and new software was loaded to accommodate the MIG welding process.”

The final result was a success and as all the equipment was purchased from Kawasaki everything fitted together with minimal effort. For more information on this set up, check out the video here.

Have you got an unloved or unused robot gathering dust?

Talk to the experts today on 03 9330 3511 or visit the RTA website www.robots.com.au.