KUKA dresses lift truck forks at Kaup

In Aschaffenburg, the company Kaup produces a wide variety of “hands” for fork lift trucks (for example, attachments such as multi-pallet handlers, slip-on arms, carton and drum clamps) across an area of 43,000 m² for all the big-name manufacturers. 8,000 standardized lift truck forks are produced using a fork welding robot in a system developed and installed by KUKA. The automated welding of the two plates with thicknesses between 40 and 80 mm creates the L-shaped blank of the fork. In subsequent steps, the forks are dressed to size and the welds are ground to a smooth finish.

At Kaup in the past, the dressing of the prepared fork blanks was a literally heavy-duty job primarily carried out manually by two employees in alternating shifts. “In 2014, we realized that the day was soon approaching when both employees would leave us to go into their well-earned retirement,” explains head of production Ernesto Martin. “Today, it is nearly impossible to find workers who are prepared to perform such a physically strenuous task day after day. After all, we are talking about more than 40 forks a day here! This was one of the reasons prompting us to discuss an automation solution with our long-standing partner, KUKA. A further motivation is that – just as is the case with many other companies – the time required for the surface finishing had never really been factored into our cycle time calculations. Every second is counted in the welding process, but manual dressing simply took as long as it did. As a result, these secondary tasks were ultimately a bottleneck in the production cycle.”