Assembly - December 2008 - (Page 43) In short, business was good, attitudes were positive, and plenty of manufacturers and suppliers still seemed plenty busy. “At this year’s show, [we] introduced two new products,” says Robert Damesworth, national sales manager for optical inspection equipment manufacturer Aven Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI). “The customer response was very positive, with well over 100 attendees wanting information. I have attended this show for over 15 years, and this was one of the best times I had.” “The overall traffic was great,” agrees Tom Bertellotti, regional manager for safety products manufacturer Tapeswitch Corp. (Farmingdale, NY). “It was one of the best attended shows we have been to in the last five years.” “It’s strange,” said one manufacturer of automated assembly components, who asked that his name not be used. “In spite of all that’s been happening on Wall Street, business is good.” The Spirit of Innovation Complementing this attitude was the spirit of innovation that continues to mark each ATExpo—still the largest assembly-only trade show in North America. As in year’s past, this can-do attitude was everywhere, evident across a wide range of technologies and in companies large and small. At the smaller end of the spectrum, for example, was a nifty company called OPS Solutions (Northville, MI), creator of a new work instructions technology it calls the Light Guide System. Intended to help assemblers improve quality, traceability and throughput at the same time it decreases training times, the system functions by projecting stepby-step work instructions directly onto a work surface or on parts bins where they can easily be seen. Manual or automatic confirmation that a step has been performed is required before the next step is activated, thereby ensuring correct processing. In addition to part numbers, processing times for each step are also automatically logged, allowing As always, this year’s Assembly Technology Expo allowed engineers to get a firsthand look at a wide range of assembly equipment. managers to perform bottleneck analysis, production trending and cycle time reporting. At the other end of the sales spectrum were companies like dispensing equipment and materials manufacturer Sonderhoff USA Corp. (Elgin, IL), a subsidiary of Sonderhoff GmbH (Cologne, Germany) that was making its ATExpo debut at this year’s show. Specializing in the sealing and assembly of everything from automotive intake manifolds to electronic relays and plug connectors, Sonderhoff brought a number of items to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, including gasketing, gluing and potting materials, and a variety of dispensing machines, including a large gantry-type system dispensing one of Sonderhoff ’s form-in-place materials. The company’s highly visible presence at ATExpo served as yet more evidence that the manufacturing sector, at least, remains committed to growing the economy, come what may. Sunny Days Another area in which many ATExpo exhibitors seemed to see plenty of opportunity was in solar panel manufacturing. This year’s A number of companies featured products and systems created specifically for the rapidly growing solar panel industry, like this solar panel conveyor from Bosch Rexroth. www.assemblymag.com December 2008 / ASSE M B LY 43 http://www.assemblymag.com
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