Honda – Laser Label System

Laser marking 3M material for VISIVIN and rating plates

Honda – Swindon

Electrox Laser, Label Marking System

// PROJECT

Honda required two stand alone label marking systems for their VISIVIN and rating labels on the vehicles they produce. They needed a cost effective solution along with a proven design. This Redstart designed system ahs been working in many high volume production lines since 2011.

Redstart Design was ideally placed to help HONDA. The design we offered is a current Redstart design and is based on many other installations we have carried out for our laser label marking systems. Each plant always wants something slightly different though, and HONDA was no exception… which is never an issue for us..

We supplied a standard Redstart laser marking system, capable of producing a laser marked label set, usually consisting of two labels (Rating and VisiVIN) on such laser tape as Tesa or 3M.

The standard laser used to produce the label set was chosen by Honda. In this case an Electrox laser was used. The Redstart system can work with various lasers including: Electrox, Telesis, Rofin and Ostling.

This system supports an initial 17 minute Tact time with the ability to reduce to 12 and 8 minutes.

The label material is indexed through the marking area to allow the label information to be produced, after this each label outline will be cut from the base material to allow the operator to remove the label from its backing and apply to the vehicle or product.
Once the label material has been completely finished the material will be indexed out of the laser marking area to a guillotine station where the marked label set will be cut from the main material roll. The label will then drop into a collection tray for the operator to use.

Material sizes: Label material 120mm wide x Max 500mm long
Capacity: Machine can accept up to 315mm diameter rolls

The overall footprint of the laser enclosure is 1700 x 650mm with the height

The laser marking head will be secured on a tooling top plate, ensuring that the laser and label feed tooling are all mounted on a single unit there by eliminating any chance of a difference in vibration between the laser head and the feed unit.

The laser focus will be fixed at the time of manufacture to ensure the optimum focus point for the material is achieved and cannot be accidentally adjusted on site – again removing the possibility of a potential problem. There will be adjustment in ‘Z’ direction via a micro wheel allowing fine adjustment and levelling of the laser to the marking surfaces.

Any lessons learnt from previous installations will be integrated into this design for Bentley to further improve the operation of this system.

Splice Detection and Feed Jam Detection is standard in the Redstart systems.

The twin front doors on the laser enclosure are for maintenance access only, and to allow the roll of label material to be changed, and should not be in general use, with the marked label sets exiting the machine from the right hand side of the enclosure.

For Bentley this is a PC control system that will always require data to be downloaded into the label template before allowing a label to be printed, the system will be unable to produce blank labels from within the function of the control software. As such it will not be necessary for the system to lock blank labels away from the Operator.

All labels produced will exit the enclosure via the same output chute into the collection box.

The laser enclosure is supplied with an internal light, and large viewing windows in the twin front doors to allow the operator to view the marking process.

The laser system is supplied with a wireless Datalogic Powerscan PM8300 hand held barcode scanner that will allow the Operator to scan the vehicle build sheet as a manual backup facility or as a double check against the information broadcast to the main software control system.

The standard laser system uses any font that is installed on the control PC, and will allow the laser system to produced different character sets.

The system PC is used to control the communications between the label system and the factory system. With this it will also control the operation of the laser system and maintain the records of marked labels within a locally held database.
32GB of solid state storage is supplied with the PC and the PC is running the Windows 7 64bit operating system.

All communications are via Ethernet

// HONDA UK

Honda of the UK Manufacturing Ltd (HUM) consists of two car plants and an engine manufacturing facility. Other areas of the site are dedicated to a purpose built test track, dynamic and static test cells, as well as administration and purchasing functions

Cars produced: CR-V, Civic 5 Door, Civic Tourer and the all new Civic Type R.