Custom gearmotors, 10 things to know
An important manufacturer has analyzed its customer interactions and relationships and produced a new white paper covering the “10 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Custom Gearmotors“.
This document focus the attention on personalized gearmotors, that meet particular application specifications of the customer. There are many questions and considerations to consider in specifying the correct geared motor for a specific application.
Many types of performances required, many gearboxes, electric motors, different features, changing environmental conditions: in many situations to configure the right product become an engineering challenge.
Bison Gear & Engineering Corp. has produced a document explaining ten things you ought to know to provide the best custom gearmotor solution:
1) Involve the Gearmotor Supplier Early in the Design Process: To the extent that you engage your gearmotor supplier’s application engineers early in your design cycle, you will ensure that you meet all of your specifications as well as your budget target. Skilled and experienced gearmotor application engineers can literally save you months of time. If brought in early, they can understand, and possibly even help you design, your test protocol. The time and expense savings are significant if you are then able to avoid gearmotor iterations that may be required when you and the gearmotor supplier are not able to work together early in a team environment. A skilled gearmotor application engineer can also help improve your machine’s performance, lifetime and profitability based on what he and his company have learned from thousands of other successful custom gearmotor applications.
2) Expect Custom Engineered Samples in a Reasonably Short Timeframe: It’s not unusual to see “next day samples” touted in marketing materials. On reading the fine print, though, that only applies to a limited variety of standard, catalog products. If your application only requires slight modification to a standard item, such as shaft detail, cord or connector, gear ratio change, etc. it is not unreasonable to expect such prototypes can be turned around in a matter of a couple weeks or so. Changes to motor windings or designs, new gearheads, castings, or other truly custom solutions will take appropriately longer. However, a good gearmotor supplier will have the resources to significantly reduce leadtimes for prototypes. With today’s rapid prototyping capabilities, it is no longer necessary to wait 16 weeks or more for a custom engineered gearmotor prototype.
3) Can They Scale-Up to Meet Your Volume?: If you are considering changing gearmotor suppliers on an existing high volume project, you need to know if they have a track record of successfully ramping up new, high volume business. They should also have the capability to quickly and effectively “reverse engineer” your existing gearmotor designs. A really good gearmotor supplier is capable of engineering and delivering more than a dozen different gearmotor models that a customer may require to replace his old supplier and ramp up to thousands of units per month production within just a couple of calendar quarters.
Continue reading the 7 remaining things.
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