Product category:
Fabrication Subcontracting Services
News Release from: Clamason Industries | Subject: Automated stamping services, presswork
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 30 July 2007
Automated presses produce set-top boxes
An automated transfer press line is being used by a subcontractor to manufacture EMI-shielded, metal enclosures for most categories of set-top box.
An automated transfer press line is being used by Clamason Industries to produce EMI-shielded, metal enclosures for most categories of set-top box, since they can incorporate up to four pressings The components are the pre-painted, zinc-plated mild steel, top cover (bought in as pre-cut blanks, with piercing and bending performed at Clamason) and the zinc-plated mild steel base, plus in some cases a printed front and back panel
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 1 Mar 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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An enclosure manufactured from four zinc-coated steel components at a lower cost has replaced a version produced from aluminium extrusions and plastics mouldings.
Even those set-top boxes which appear to be made of plastics, such as the Sky HD box from Thomson, still utilise three pressed parts, the outer skin being merely cosmetic.
Clamason has been able to help the household names in this field, such as Thomson, Pioneer and Panasonic, because of its successful track record of having made the original BSkyB decoder box for Pace in the mid-1990's.
For that major project, Clamason installed at its Kingswinford, West Midlands, UK, factory a special Chin Fong Worcester transfer press line of six linked presses.
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Clamason is currently manufacturing 2.5 million per year of a component for Securistyle, which is produced in pairs for the top and bottom of a window.
The transfer press line produces highly complex parts with no carry strip and the automatic insertion of other components.
It has the facility to reverse the burr side automatically within the process.
It is ideally suited to complex and intricate set-top box applications where the maintenance of the highest aesthetic standards and surface quality is essential.
The automated press line uses robots to rapidly and carefully transfer pressings between stations.
The company said it compares well with some Far Eastern practices where many set-top boxes are made using manual transfer between press operations.
Having opened a 10,000ft2 plant (with a mirror transfer press line for set-top boxes) in 2006 at Nitra in the Slovak Republic, Clamason is now well placed to deliver locally produced products to major electronics companies.
These include Panasonic, Hitachi and Philips to Celestica, Elcoteq and Flextronics.
This new factory is part of Clamason's strategy of staying geographically close to such key OEMs, who may require critical, bi-weekly or even daily, deliveries on a just-in-time basis.
* About digital set-top boxes or digiboxes - all digital TV uses multiplexing to combine and compress multiple TV channels into a single transmission that needs to be decoded by a suitable digital receiver.
Digital set-top boxes or digiboxes are the receivers for digital terrestrial TV (Freeview), digital satellite TV services (from providers BSkyB, BT Vision and Setanta Sports) and cable TV (Virgin Media) available to the UK viewing public.
There are basically three types of set-top box offering different functions - reception only, recordable (on to disc or hard drive as in Sky Plus) and high-definition TV (the last-named being recordable but in the latest high-definition format, for example Sky HD).
Clamason said that its set-top box customers in Central Europe can now get exactly what they want when they want it, in order to satisfy growing demand for digital TV.
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