Over the course of last week, one of Automec’s newest Engineers took a road trip down to Hughesville, PA to help with part of an installation for one of our customers on a Squaregage™ Plus control . Blair designed and installed a modified Squaregage control and cables to make the Squaregage more resilient to static discharge, so the customer could continue using their existing workflow.
The problem occurred as the customer cut large pieces of plastic using their shear. Due to the way the customer was handling the material and how the sliding of the plastic caused a static charge to build up on the sheet; the plastic sheets were zapping the Squaregage causing the gauge to behave incorrectly. Blair mentions, “Because over 90% of Automec’s products are used to bend and shear metal, the controls were not designed to take a direct hit from such a large spark. Static discharge is almost never an issue when working with metal”. I had to modify the Squaregage cables and connectors to make it suitable for this customer’s application. We want all our customers to achieve the best possible increase in productivity from our products, no matter what type of material they’re working with”. Blair was able to have the control pass engineering tests by shielding the electronics from both a direct hit of 40,000 volts minimum, and the electrical noise generated by the sparks.
Blair’s modifications acted as a shield for the cables with this control, which allowed the control to tolerate the type of severe static shocks that can occur when working with non-conductive materials. The customer can now continue their production normally without making changes to their existing method of handling the material. Automec is proud to facilitate customers with hands on applications or installs such as the one mentioned here.