Brown & Holmes Case Study
Company
Brown&Holmes
Industry
Industrial Machinery Manufacturing
Country
United Kingdom
Company Size
60 employees
Rather than sharing a case study on the experience of a real company using Safedoor, this time we bring a slightly different article about the experience of one of our distributors instead: Brown & Holmes.
The Company
Brown & Holmes is based in Tamworth, the United Kingdom, and specialises in designing and manufacturing superior workholding solutions, producing 3D printed prototypes, and delivering both precision and sub-contract machining solutions. It offers a range of internationally renowned products that offer complementary technology to its services, namely, Safedoor.
Mark Haywood, a Workholding Specialist at Brown & Holmes, gave an interview to MTDCNC, an online platform that covers multiple sectors of the engineering industry, where he shared some thoughts on Safedoor.
Why is Safedoor an Important Product for Brown & Holmes?
Mark starts by stating that Safedoor is more than an automated door opener. Indeed, one of the best features of this system is that it can be retrofitted to pretty much any CNC machine in any context. Safedoor integrates into the control system, so it’s safe to use and it’s ideal to assist operators in instances where the door is opening and closing a lot of times on short cycles.
Safety Factors and Risk Assessments
Brown & Holmes’ goal is to provide its clients with solutions and products that are safe to use. In fact, Safedoor is inherently safe with force feedback in action, and both e-stop and interlocks are integrated into the CNC machine. He also pointed out that the team from Brown & Holmes always ensures that risk assessments are made to ensure that the application is correctly implemented when installing the system to any CNC Machine.
Does Safedoor Fit Any CNC Machine?
“(Safedoor) can fit any machine, whether it’s a new machine, a six-month-old machine, or an older machine. The idea is to give versatility to machine shops like our own.”
Mark Haywood, Workholding Specialist at Brown and Holmes
Thus, Safedoor is a very versatile product as it can be integrated into single, double, or even concertina doors regardless of its age and specifications.
How Does Safedoor Really Work?
According to Brown&Holmes, the key feature of Safedoor is that it’s not based on limit switches, it is based on force feedback instead. Meaning that the controller that comes with the system, when first installed, “cycles the door backward and forward and learns where the start and finish points are so that it gets a safe acceleration and deceleration curve”. Besides that, it includes interlocks and e-stops integration, reducing engineering time to add these features during a project.
Additionally, Safedoor can be controlled by a Cobot. Mark explains how: “the cobot can, as part of the program, tell the machine when to open and close the door through the controller”.
Why Did Brown & Holmes Decide to Include Safedoor in its Portfolio of Products?
By partnering with Made4CNC, Brown & Holmes wants to show its customers how easy it is to set up an automated solution through Safedoor.
“We can see that machine tool suppliers supply beautiful turnkey solutions which are probably purchased on the back of large projects. But machine shops like our own are not set up for automation. Whereas this is key, this is where it comes in.”
Mark Haywood, Workholding Specialist at Brown and Holmes
In the video, Mark shows how the whole integration looks like on a Bridgeport VMC 610 XP using an Omron Techman Cobot and Safedoor. Give it a look!
A special thanks to Brown&Holmes for their constant collaboration and to MTDCNC for the video production.