Launching a Laser Welding Lab

Emag hosted an open house along with the launch of its new Laser Welding Laboratory June 8 at its U.S. headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The event was an opportunity for the company’s customers, representatives and distributors to witness live equipment demonstrations along with technical presentations made by Emag executives and members of other industry groups.

The centerpiece of the new lab is the ELC 250 Duo compact laser welding system for machining gear components. This twin-spindle, two-station machine allows for loading and unloading the spindles during the cycle. Primarily targeting the automotive industry, the lab will provide services including weld-seam-design consultation, pre-turning and weld-prototype support, among others.

In addition to the ELC 250 Duo, live demonstrations were conducted on the VL 2 and VL 4 vertical modular turning machines, offering high production performance and featuring integrated automation and space-saving vertical lathes. Demos were also performed on the VT 2-4 and VT 4-4 machines for shaft production with high-speed loading and unloading processes.

Peter Loetzner, CEO of Emag LLC, made opening remarks, followed by Andreas Mootz, managing director of Emag Automation, Jens Standfuss, with Fraunhofer, and Achim Feinauer, COO of the Emag Group.

Pat McGibbon—vice president of strategic analytics at AMT–The Association For Manufacturing Technology—spoke on “The Manufacturing Economy 2016 and Beyond.” He listed the primary challenges to the U.S. manufacturing technology market as taxes and slowdowns in the automotive and energy sectors. As for the path of trends in manufacturing technology, he cited Oxford Economics, which expects "a decline of 1.2 percentage points but a big finish to the year," ITR Economics, which sees a “rise in demand coming—be ready,” and Steven Kline, director of market intelligence at Gardner Business Media, who says “the downturn in manufacturing technology orders is average—both in duration and depth.”