All machines Machines
How these machines work
Footage shows you that something happened. These pages tell you why it happened, what the machine is actually doing and what the numbers mean. Written by people who buy and sell this equipment, not by a press office.
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Robotics and Factory AutomationRobotic Palletizing and Handling Cells
A palletizing cell is a robot arm, a gripper, a pallet position, a conveyor feeding it and a fence with an interlocked gate. It takes cases, bags, trays or bundles off the end of a packaging line and stacks them onto a pallet in a pattern that will survive a truck.
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Giant MachinesTunnel Boring Machines
A tunnel boring machine digs a tunnel and builds it at the same time. It is not a drill.
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Giant MachinesBucket Wheel Excavators
A bucket wheel excavator digs continuously rather than in cycles. Where a shovel fills a bucket, swings, dumps and swings back, a bucket wheel keeps a wheel of buckets turning against the face and pours a permanent river of material onto a conveyor.
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Giant MachinesWalking Draglines
A dragline removes the overburden sitting on top of a coal or mineral seam. It throws a bucket out on a rope, drags it back through the ground to fill it, hoists it, swings, and dumps the spoil in a pile behind itself.
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Textile and Bedding AutomationMattress Quilting Lines
Quilting is what turns flat ticking fabric and loose foam or fiber into the padded panel that becomes the top, bottom and border of a mattress. It is not decoration.
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Textile and Bedding AutomationAir Jet Weaving Machines
A weaving machine interlaces two sets of yarn at right angles to make cloth. The warp runs the length of the fabric and is held under tension across the machine.
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PrecisionWire EDM
Wire EDM cuts hardened, conductive metal to accuracies conventional machining cannot reach, using electrical sparks instead of a cutting edge. Nothing mechanical ever touches the workpiece, which means there is no cutting force, no tool pressure and therefore no distortion in a thin or delicate part.
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PrecisionLarge Gear Grinding and Hobbing
Gears are how torque changes speed and direction, and a gear is only as good as the shape of its tooth flank. Gear machines cut and then grind those flanks to a form accurate enough that the gear runs quietly, shares load evenly across the face, and survives decades under reversing loads.
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Plastics and RecyclingHigh-Speed Injection Molding
Injection molding turns plastic pellets into finished parts by melting the material and forcing it into a steel mold under pressure. In the high-speed packaging class the whole cycle, including opening the tool, ejecting the parts and closing again, happens faster than most people can say the sentence.
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Food and PackagingHigh-Speed Bottling and Canning Lines
A bottling line takes an empty or not yet existing container and delivers a sealed, labelled, dated, packed and palletised product without a human hand touching the product path. It is one continuous machine that happens to be spread over a building.
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Printing and ConvertingFolder-Gluers and Carton Converting
A folder-gluer takes a flat printed and die cut blank and turns it into a finished carton: folded on the right creases, glued in the right place, pressed, counted and bundled. It is the last machine in the packaging plant and usually the fastest thing in the building.
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Energy and Heavy IndustryHot Strip Rolling Mills
A hot strip mill takes a slab of steel the size of a shipping container, heated until it glows, and squeezes it into a coil of strip a few millimetres thick and hundreds of meters long. It is the process that makes most of the flat steel in the world.
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FuturisticHumanoid Factory Robots
A humanoid robot is an attempt to automate the jobs that were never worth building a special machine for: fetching a bin, sorting mixed parts into a sequencing trolley, moving something from here to there in a building designed entirely around the human body. The argument for the human shape is not sentiment.
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Additive ManufacturingMetal 3D Printing
Metal additive manufacturing builds a part up out of metal instead of cutting it out of a block. Several different processes share that description and they are not interchangeable.