Swedish Lerocon AB’s welding machines perform resistance welding with a focus on fastener welding. This area of the manufacturing process demands high standards of accuracy and quality, so there is little room for error. For example, consider the process of attaching a body panel to a car. It needs several bolts welded in exact locations. Misplacement of any welded bolts would disrupt the manufacturing process and incur downtime.

To optimize production in areas such as these, Lerocon began to design and manufacture automated adapted nut welding machines used in robot cells years ago. Their welding machines meet the highest customer requirements while working within robotic cells on the factory floor.

Different customers, however, have different requirements. To meet this demand, Lerocon created a modular product range that facilitates unique customer solutions. These solutions address customer needs by bringing various components together in custom configurations, much like building designs from a Lego® library of existing parts.

To be able to offer this sort of bespoke product, you need a CAD system that supports modular design and lets you work faster, better, and easier. After years of struggling with other 3D modeling systems that fought against its bespoke approach to welding machine design, Lerocon found an ideal CAD solution in IronCAD.

“We used to have one of the usual parametric 3D CAD platforms, but it did not offer the flexibilityand speed we needed. The system was based on constraints and it meant that we often had toredraw the components as the design intent didn’t match customer needs. In addition, you had todistinguish between parts and assembly files which really impacted our productivity. We lacked the freedom to work in a single file for the project and to then only link out to external files when it suited us.

Therefore, a few years ago, we changed to IronCAD. We can now construct our robot cells andwelding machines by dragging and dropping assembly components from a catalog. Our standard concept includes fully or semi-automatic workpiece feeding systems where we reuse previous, proven solutions to the greatest possible extent. As IronCAD allows changes completely free of design intent, we can reuse the previously created structures and adapt them to new customer needs without any problems.

We never know what our next customers’ needs will be, but we can easily adapt thanks to all the options IronCAD provides. We get to design the way we want, regardless of how the design was originally built.”

“Here we can use the 3D mechanism functions available in IronCAD — for example, dropping in an industrial robot to see how it can move and see if it reaches where it should. Our customers are under constant pressures to deliver faster, high-quality products at the right price. With our solutions, we provide this and help keep manufacturing companies competitive by increasing their capacity and lowering their costs through the automation delivered by our welding machines.”