Baldor Electric Co. (Fort Smith, AR) manufactures electric motors, drives and generators. Central to this process is building coils for its products. In its commercial motor line, cycle times for winding stator assemblies were up to a full day and required time-consuming manual labor at a number of steps. To increase throughput and decrease costs, Baldor installed an automated stator assembly system from Alliance Winding Equipment (Fort Wayne, IN).
As part of this system, Baldor installed six customized Alliance winding machines. These winders are actually driven by Baldor motors and coordinated using Baldor software. Each winder incorporates six BSM servomotors, six FlexDrive controllers and the NextMovePCI motion control card.