Assembly in Action: Wire Cutter and Stripper Improve Manufacturing Process
To strip the cables, production operators used a homemade hot knife. "It was, however, a spooky process," says Kip Landry, process and equipment engineer. The hot knife was not a repeatable device, so most of the critical end results corresponded to the operator's knowledge and technique. The homemade hot knife was able to produce a prototype or sample, but it was unsuccessful when dealing with large production orders. These large orders put the company in a challenging predicament, especially when the company had a large order on standby. The company needed to make a decision about the way that it was stripping cable.
The large order that the company had acquired caused a great deal of concern regarding volume, consistency, operational costs and on-time delivery. Thus, the decision was made to purchase Schleuniger Inc.'s (Manchester, NH) JacketStrip 8400.