Machining of engine blocks

Engine blocks have to gripped each individually from the gripping unit from one side and turned by 90° and machined afterwards. After machining, the engines are turned by 360°. This makes it possible to get rid of all the coolant and chips which start building up in the engine during the machining process.

SCHUNK suggested the customer to use the PFH gripper, a 2-Finger Parallel gripper with extended stroke of the fingers. SCHUNK designed the fingers in a way to have 100mm stroke per jaw. This serves as transmission for external ball bearing circulation guidance for higher torque absorption. For the 360° turn, 2 sets of electrical swiveling jaws are used.

The application has been running trouble free while reducing cylce time and reducing number of steps in loading and unloading processes of the machine.