While Ford recently gave up on becoming a major player in the Chinese automotive market, the company still builds and sells vehicles there via a few joint-ventures. Those include Jiangling Ford, which is focused on pickups and SUVs, as well as JMC Ford, which has been building a variety of Blue Oval models – including exports – for years now. Now, one particular JMC Ford plant has been treated to a pretty new and high-tech body-in-white (BIW) manufacturing system that’s 100 percent automated, too.
According to Automation World, this new flexible assembly system will be used at the JMC Ford plant in Xiaolan, which is located in the Jiangxi province of China, to build “high-end pickup trucks.” The system has an annual capacity of 125,000 vehicles, and will reportedly improve welding accuracy and stability – resulting in a more efficient process, as well as one that’s safer and leads to better structural integrity.
The BIW welding system was created by a company called Comau, which notes that it’s also less reliant on frequent tool changes and uses automation technologies such as advanced vision inspection technology that will reportedly result in better quality control throughout the production process. Comau also created a removable, flexible fixture loading table that can be altered to suit various assembly tasks and different kinds of parts, which should result in less time wasted changing lines and tooling, coupled with the OpenGate assembly system – a feature focused on accuracy that provides a switching cycle time of just 50 seconds, on average.
“Our goal was to create a more efficient, reliable, and flexible production line for the rapidly expanding pickup truck market, and we have achieved impressive outcomes,” said Ma Jian, JMC Ford’s head of manufacturing engineering.
JMC has been building Blue Oval-branded vehicles for years now after FoMoCo invested in the company and became a major shareholder back in 1995. Back in 2022, the company exported more than 60,000 units to places like the Middle East, South America, and the ASEAN region.
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