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Stamping at Renault Trucks
"Renault Trucks can use both the existing dies of an
older press line and specially developed dies for the
production of the new truck cabins," says Dr. Martin
Habert, managing director of Schuler SMG and head of
Technology, Field Hydraulic Presses (schulergroup.com).
He's speaking of what the French manufacturer has
done in its stamping operations, driven by the need to
develop a new lineup of vehicles to meet Euro 6 emissions
standards for trucks, which go into efect January 1, 2014.
In all, Renault Trucks is using more than 80 diferent die
sets to produce the cabs for its range of trucks in its plant
in Lyon. The new system from Schuler—a blank loader, a
2,000-metric ton hydraulic press, three 1,000-ton presses,
and material-handling automation—allows die set and
tooling changes in less than fve minutes. "This makes
q Renault Trucks uses a high-performance Schuler
hydraulic press line to build its new feet.
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producing even the smallest batch sizes both simple and
economic," Habert says.
The line can operate at up to 11 strokes per minute, and
as two parts can be made in tandem, that's 22 parts per
minute. The bed-slide surfaces are 4.1 x 2.5 m.
In operation, fanning magnets are used to separate the
blanks so a robot picks up one blank at a time to place on
a conveyor. An optical centering station determines the
position of the blanks on the conveyor so that the pressloading robot is able to appropriately locate the blank
in the die of the lead press for deep drawing. Schuler
Crossbar Robots are used to move the stamping between
the subsequent presses. These presses help minimize the
overall length of the line.
Overall size was a key consideration. According to
Schuler, the press line was tailored to the size of the
Renault Trucks stamping hall.