Through the long life of Tuff Automation, we’ve gained clarity on how business gets done. We’ve done so by creating, understanding, and implementing some key attributes that are most known with our company model, mission, and name.
We specialize in designing, manufacturing, and installing custom material handling equipment and systems. Since we sell custom equipment, we have a long history of partnering with system integrators to help provide equipment and systems for customers of any industry. As a result, many of those integrators have become long term partners for decades.
Why do system integrators use us? They use us to handle areas of their systems that they themselves would call “difficult” or “custom beyond understanding.” They use our expertise to provide solutions for those difficult areas that may require product orientation, special controls integration, or a custom machine that other manufactures can’t or won’t provide.
The reason for that is because most integrators are also distributors for a variety of different equipment suppliers. Therefore, they become experts in a wide array of standard equipment. However, most systems require a custom application to handle certain product types, in a certain way, and in a specific amount of time.
Here are a few pieces of equipment we’ve provided to handle some of those custom applications:
1. Pneumatic Lifts Instead of Scissor Lifts
Ordinary scissor lifts are rated for a lifetime of approximately 200,000 cycles. The vertically mounted cylinders on our pneumatic lifts make possible a lifetime of several million cycles. If your application exceeds a cycle time of 45 cycles per hour or 500 cycles per day, you’ll see the return on investment on a pneumatic lift in no time.
Our pneumatic lift design is simple. It’s a direct lift design that significantly reduces side loading forces. Therefore, they are easier to precisely position than a scissor lift—which makes them an excellent fit for automatic loading or unloading applications that is hard to find anywhere else.
Learn more: https://www.tuffautomation.com/lifts
2. Heavy Duty Slat Conveyor
Traditionally, a slat conveyor is used to manually assemble parts through an assembly process, which is a common understanding throughout the industry of material handling. However, most standard conveyor distributors only provide slat conveyors for light weight parts applications. This usually leaves end users from industries such as the automotive industry, out of being able to integrate the slat conveyor into their heavy part assembly applications.
Its projects like these that steer system integrators in our direction. We have partnered with globally known integrators to provide heavy duty slat conveyors to hold and transport items like motors, transmissions, and axles for worldwide automobile manufacturers!
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grH_XjAv0D0
3. Custom Conveyor Components
Since integrators are accustomed to implementing standard equipment into the systems they design, they have easily implemented our custom designed conveyor components to fit their standard equipment. These custom conveyor components include:
a. Transfers
b. Lifts
c. Turntable (automatic or manual)
d. End Stops
e. Blade Stops
For example, many distributors provide a standard conveyor that places its rollers on 3” center measurements. Unfortunately, those same distributors seldomly sell or provide between-roller transfers that accompany those measurements.
Therefore, using Tuff Automation’s Mechanical Engineers, system integrators are able to design, showcase, and quote custom conveyor components to be included into their standard equipment systems. This is especially useful if the product being conveyed requires a unique design.
Learn More: https://www.tuffautomation.com/conveyor-components-1
We hope it goes without saying that we consider ourselves to be partners with material handling system integrators, small or large. Tuff Automation prides itself on staying loyal in their business relationships to not only continue working with other companies for the long term future, but to also serve the customer while doing so.