Design and Fabrication of an Automatic Ruler Printing Machine

Abstract

Automation has been popular among most manufacturing and production systems due to improved efficiency, high production rates and low wastage. The project was focused on Designing and Fabrication of an Automated Ruler Printing Machine for stationary item manufacturing industry. The main objective of this research was to fully automate the twelve-inch ruler printing mechanism which was currently based on manual production methods. Due to the drawbacks of existing ruler printing processes of Sri Lanka, the mechanism was proposed to be automated in order to minimize consumption of human labor and time while improving safety, production hours and production rates of the manufacturing process. The research was focused on automating basic functions of ruler printing process such as loading, unloading, cleaning, printing and packing to reduce the human involvement in the process. Thus, the proposed method basically focusses on rotary indexing mechanism to synchronize all the functions of the manufacturing process to support the continuous loading and unloading of rulers. It was designed to increase the rate of production by printing four rulers at once while saving the cost of labor by reducing human involvement by automating main functions of the manufacturing process. The research was focused on introducing online packing section and inbuilt ink drying mechanism to reduce the work in process (WIP) and lead times during production while improving accuracy and efficiency of the process by using a compact design.