CFCM November/December 2022
By Noelle Stapinsky
For all manufacturers, the act of loading and off-loading parts and products, as well as transporting those items between various processes throughout a facility has always been a laborious task, and in many cases a known bottleneck for production. And whether it’s the ultra slim labour pool or just demand for higher throughput, the finishing industry is swiftly shifting its focus to enhancing material handling processes with automated solutions. And who would know the nuances of such industrial processes better than a designer and manufacturer of turnkey finishing systems.
Therma-Tron-X Inc. (TTX) has rapidly grown over the years into the one-stop-shop that it is today with all design, engineering and fabrication in-house at its 280,000-sq.-ft facility in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. It develops finishing systems for ecoat, autodeposition, and liquid and powder coating, but it also has an arsenal of customisable material handling solutions.
“The root of our business is in designing and building finishing systems,” says Tony Scoville, lead design engineer for TTX. “But one thing that we see all the time is that the customer is responsible for placing the product in the system. And that is where we’re seeing the need for automation, as those processes are typically very labour-intensive.”
Depending on what the customer needs and the floorspace available, TTX will customise a material handling solution or work with companies that have their own solution that they need to optimise.
Since its inception in 1969 when it started as a custom industrial oven manufacturer, TTX has been building monorail systems and components to carry parts through the paint application processes on a continuously moving chain.
“The monorail I-beam finishing system can be used for powder coating, ecoating and liquid spray process,” says Scoville. “One of the downsides of these older systems is that there’s a lot of equipment that goes into it. But the advantage is that production rates are really high with the monorail because you can hang product anywhere you want and since the chain is constantly moving, you get that constant flow of product throughout your finishing system.”
In the late 90s, TTX developed the SideRail Square Transfer (SST) system, which Scoville says is an indexing system that’s commonly used for ecoat finishing. The SST uses only a fraction of the space needed for traditional monorails and is designed for high volume finishing operations. With this system, racks of products can be suspended from load bars and raised or lowered in processing ranks.
“This is a unique design as we’re basically using an end-to-end carrier that’s being pushed throughout the process and it can be designed in either an over/under or a side-by-side application,” says Scoville. “And one of the biggest reasons we developed the SST is to save floor space.”
