Maschinenfabrik Berthold Hermle : C 42 | RS 3L robot system | RONAL Group | Ready for 24 inches

From the left: Nuno Santos, Managing Director at RON AG, with the toolmaking crew Carlos Dias, Petra Wyss, Vignehwaran Kandiah, Nassif Bilal and Stefan Borner, Tooling Production Manager at RON AG, and Christian Simon, Area Sales Manager at Hermle (Schweiz) AG.

The RONAL GROUP invested in six Hermle 3-axis machining centres which mill complex casting moulds for light alloy wheels around the clock. The quality of the surfaces is so excellent that the employees have to do less manual reworking. The RS 3Lrobot system, which also reliably operates the machines at night and on weekends, also ensures shorter throughput times and increased productivity.

It takes up to 20 hours of manual reworking before the negative of a wheel rim is ready for low-pressure casting. "Some of these are millimetre-small surfaces and geometries which have to be milled really cleanly and later finished by hand," says Stefan Borner, Tooling Production Manager at RON AG, tool manufacturer of the RONAL GROUP. Borner walks past a workstation where an employee is perfecting a brightly illuminated mould using a fine tool. The wheel rim is later cast in this so-called low-pressure casting mould and would reflect any imprecision in the process.

The RONAL GROUP develops and manufactures light alloy wheels for passenger cars and commercial vehicles. The company carries out all production steps itself - from design and toolmaking to casting, gloss milling, lasering and pad printing. To this end, the group has 14 production sites on three continents, two toolmaking sites in Europe, a logistics centre and an innovation centre in Germany. What began in 1969 with the RONAL R1 light alloy rims in 15 wheel sizes is now a must-have for renowned car manufacturers, racing drivers and aftermarket customers. In 2020, the RONAL GROUP generated a turnover of around one billion euros and employs 7,500 people worldwide. Around 200 of them are based at the main site in Härkingen, Switzerland. RON AG has 20 employees working in production. One of them is Stefan Borner who continues walking through the production hall which will not be completed until 2020.

His target is a new system from Maschinenfabrik Berthold Hermle AGwhich will help to reduce manual reworking and increase productivity in toolmaking. It will replace several machining centres which, with 60,000 spindle hours, were "totally end of life and that was also noticeable in the quality", as Borner adds. The demands on the new machine were diverse and high: Borner expects perfect surfaces, reduced non-productive times and the adaptation of the old programs. The personnel effort should be as low as possible despite increased productivity - and therefore it was clear that automation was also a must. The RONAL GROUP considered several machine manufacturers - and tested them: "We designed a milled part, wrote the programs for it and provided the tools. Every machine manufacturer in question was given this part so that the comparison was as equal as possible. After evaluating the results, Hermle was already pretty far ahead," says Borner.