March 31, 2015. A robot-aided stamping unit meant for making blanks of box-and-pin joints was launched at Orsk Machine-Building Plant (a member enterprise of Pipe Metallurgical Company/TMK) on March 27, TMK press service reports.

The launching ceremony was attended by Governor of Orenburg Region Yuri Berg, TMK BOD Chairman Dmitri Pumpyanski, Mayor of Orsk Viktor Frantz, TMK Director-General Alexander Shiryayev, and the plant’s long-service employees and other workers.

The unit is meant for making precise stamped blanks that will be used to manufacture box-and-pin joints with the help of up-to-date technologies. The machine’s capacity is estimated at 150,000 blanks a year. Blanks can have outer diameter of 105mm to 184mm and inner diameter of 48mm to 110mm and be up to 607mm long. The installation of the unit required some 430m RUR worth of investments, and thirty new hi tech jobs were created at the plant as a result.

Combined with the annealing line that was launched at the enterprise in 2013, the induction furnace, the cutoff machine, and a number of robotic arms, the new unit makes part of a single technological chain.

The launch of this robot-aided stamping unit means the plant can improve its metal utilization factor by 1.3 times (up to 0.7), which will bring at least 20m RUR in annual savings. Besides, energy spending is expected to go down since natural gas will be used instead of electric power.