UrBC, Yekaterinburg, November 10, 2016. New, robot-aided equipment is now getting assembled at Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation’s head plant in Nizhniy Tagil, the company press service reports.

The goal is to give up on manual labor and reduce the time needed to treat sole-bars and bolsters for the plant’s railcar bogies.

‘The equipment manufacturers are in charge of the assembly jobs, while Ural Vagon Zavod team is responsible for tech support. Our Technological Equipment Repairs Department workers are also engaged in ancillary tasks such as welding, craning, and other jobs. It is reported that everything is being done on schedule, so the commissioning date is set for December 2016,’ the press service says.

Once the new equipment has been assembled, the sole-bars and bolsters will get fed into a conveyor and then onto the blast cabinet for abrasive steel shot treatment; they will then go on to a robot-aided unit that will crop the top parts and the pouring gate systems automatically. For the time being, this has to be done manually, but the new unit only requires an operator to control it. The department workers will still have a lot to do, nevertheless, as the plant has more than plenty of orders for railcar and special vehicle parts.

This is not the first time a robot-aided unit gets launched at Ural Vagon Zavod. Robots are also used at the sand core-making section of Foundry Department 4 and will soon be used at Foundry Department 2 to get parts ready for non-destructive testing.