An unidentified forklift manufacturer may ask Lauyans & Co Inc to build a duplicate of a Lauyans-created system for boosting production of mast beams.

"(Originally), they needed to increase production to accommodate pending orders and wanted to automate a production area that up to that point had been very labour-intense and required a lot of dangerous manual intervention by the system operators," says Tom Alexander, product manager for Lauyans engineered product solutions. In making forklift masts, "the process requires that these long and heavy loads be advanced through different production machines".

Prior to 2001, the forklift manufacturer transported individual beams on four-wheel carts.

"The different operations also required the mast to be rolled about the beam's axis into different orientations," Alexander notes. "The existing means of rotation was manual intervention with a pipe wrench or 'cheater bar', a process fraught with opportunities for injury and fatigue."

Lauyans engineers worked with the end-user to develop a synchronous pallet-handling line that is designed to convey these forklift masts through the progressive manufacturing operations.

Individually, "masts are conveyed along the production line in fixtures that are mounted to custom-designed pallets", he says. "These fixtures allow operators to easily rotate the mast in 90-degree increments as required for the process at their workstation. Masts can be rolled out of the fixture and into the appropriate workstation. The fixture/pallets are captive to the system."

During 2001, representatives for Lauyans and the customer met initially in April and reached conceptual and pricing phases in June. The system including ancillary transfer stations became operational in the first quarter of 2002 serving a single line in the customer's manufacturing facility.

The existing system has a length of 86 ft. (26.2 m), a width of 25 ft. (7.6 m) and a working height of 3 ft. (0.9 m).

Privately owned Louisville-based Lauyans was formed in 1986 and prides itself on providing innovative solutions in materials handling. Typical functions for the US-manufactured products include automated storage and retrieval, automated transfer, overhead conveyor and customised creations.