I was fortunate to be involved with several groundbreaking robotics applications at J&L in the late 70’s. I believe the first one was with a company named Thiokol, in Louisiana. They bought two TNC’s and a robot made by AMF-Versatran. The workpiece was an aluminum artillery part called an “ogive”. Basically the nosepiece of an artillery shell. The Versatran unit was basically a point-to-point mechanism, which was capable of picking up a “rough” (unfinished) workpiece from a loading table, pivoting, and then entering the lathe to load same workpiece in the lathe chuck. It worked pretty well once it was programmed. All the motions were straight-line, unlike later robots that could move tangentially. The lathe would machine the tapered OD and do some threading. This was the only AMF robot that we ever sold; it’s possible that it was specified by the customer, but I don’t remember.

The name Fanuc is now widely recognized in the machine tool world; in the beginning they forged a partnership with General Electric, probably to gain market accessibility in the U.S.. Fanuc N.C. controls are now the most widely used ones in the world. But they also became involved with robotics in the 70’s. We sold a few TNC lathes with small, machine mounted Fanuc robots (the AMF unit was floor mounted). I can remember  job for Detroit Diesel, where the robots job was to load a large, hollow, cylindrical forging in the lathe chuck, machine one end, and then unload, placing the workpiece on an open-bottomed, flat table, machined side up. The robot would then ungrip and retract, then come up from below the table, regrip, and reload in the lathe (basically turning the workpiece 180 degrees). The lathe would then machine the unfinished end.

By far the most complicated robotic job we ever did was for International-Harvester. They had developed a hot forging process for differential bevel gears for their small tractors. Their plan was to be able to hot forge the bevel gear teeth accurately enough so that no further gear cutting or shaving would be necessary. But the gears had quite a bit of “flash” on the edges. which hindered their being loaded robotically into our lathe (flash is excess metal squeezed out during the forging process). After several months of quoting and preliminary design work, we ended up with four separate pieces of equipment to do the job: 1) a loading table, where the workpieces came into the nest in known positions. 2) a deburr machine which was suppose to remove the flash (it never did work properly). 3) the TNC lathe which did the actual machining work on the gears (turning and boring). 4) the robot, centrally located, floor mounted, to service (and reach) the first three above. The finished gears were to be placed back on the loading table. I should mention that the original purchase order from I-H was for two complete “nests”, on nest having two TNC’s, and one nest having three. A  total of (5) TNC’s, (2) robots, (2) loading tables, and (2) deburr units.

The project was a very long running one, well over a year in development (during the Christmas season, the electrical techs on the job programmed one robot to mix drinks!).

We didn’t realize it at the time, but I-H was having financial problems, and they declared bankruptcy. They found any excuse to refuse delivery, and J&L ended up selling off the TNC’s to other customers. The deburr units and loading tables were scrapped. A very costly project for J&L.