From passive deburring to proactive deburring

Does anybody know the disease known as VWF, or “vibration-induced white fingers?” VWF is an occupational disease that can be easily contracted by people working in production lines who take care of deburring and finishing processes. The disease is triggered after long use of tools and accompanied by extreme vibrations, with the hand and wrist beginning to suffer autonomic nervous system dysfunction, which leads to the constant shaking of hands and whitening of fingertips due to bad blood circulation.

• Is it possible to maintain the same quality work by working non-stop on such highly stressful tasks all day?
• Do the workers enjoy these tasks?
• Is it not better to focus on how to harness the limited human resource in areas with something of extra value that is rewarding, and thus link to happier working people and higher competiveness of the company?

From the company’s viewpoint, deburring is an undesirable part in their business because not only does it not produce any return, it also comes with high-risk elements like cost and instability of quality. One solution to eliminate that instability is, we believe, the automation of deburring, which does not rely on manual labor. Automation will not only eliminate such instability, it will also lead to the creation of new added values. For instance, if 3 people working on deburring were reduced for one year, the labor cost saved would nearly equal the cost of one new machine tool.

However, despite this, according to our findings, over 60% of people in charge of new production lines are unable to discuss active measures even though they are already aware of burrs created during production. As a result, precious time is always lost in getting superficial manual deburring done or trying to come up with solutions afterwards.

This is a brief outline of the situation and issues concerning deburring and finishing<link>.

The current method of deburring can be understood as ‘passive deburring.’

The reality is that while the company expects for ‘no burrs,’ for those removing them it is practically ‘free labor.’ Our proposal is that, the best way to eliminate cost and instability of quality that are the risky elements of productions will be to face this reality and discuss actively what can be done, right from the designing stage to prior to production.

Many of our clients have been successful with automation after they have launched their production lines, by using both our tools and their existing facilities to improve the production process. In addition, triggered by the improvement, most clients who launch their next-generation or new parts production lines follow that incentive to consider deburring at an early stage before production development. That is to say, they opted for proactive deburring, which has ensured them all the merits of automated deburring, such as not having to waste any labor, time, and cost.

We believe that the manufacturing strength of a business lies in whether the production engineer at the processing site is able to instruct the development and design staff on how to realize the ‘no burr allowed’ note on drawing.

In order to achieve that, we think it is vital for everyone working at different levels of the production to share the idea of moving from passive deburring to proactive deburring. <link>.

While admittedly the automation of deburring may not be perfectly executed due to the parts used and the region it is adopted, we think developed countries with accumulated experience and technological abilities in manufacturing would make the perfect place where we can come up with the best of ideas. It is our company’s hope to be able to contribute to your businesses by providing tools that can improve the automation of deburring.

President & CEO

Norihiko Sumiyoshi