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UMaine Advanced Manufacturing Center Creates Crimping Device for Maine Sail Company
John Belding, Director, Advanced Manufacturing Center: “Hi, my name's John Belding. I'm
the director of the Advanced Manufacturing Center, and what we're showing you here today
is a project we've worked on for Gemini Canvas. John LeMole is the
principal of that company, and he's commissioned us to make a prototype crimping machine for
him and for their company. They make struts and assemblies for holding canvas on sailboats
and pleasure boats, and currently they assemble these by driving
pins — as you can see — through the small holes in the parts. And it's very time-consuming
for them, and often the holes are not lined up properly, so what we have developed for
them is a machine that can crimp that onto the hinge instead of just
driving pins in. So it takes about a 15-minute process down to about a one-minute process,
maybe even less.”
John LeMole, Owner, Gemini Marine Canvas: “I'm John LeMole of Gemini Marine Products
and Gemini Marine Canvas of Rockland, Maine, and we've had the Advanced Manufacturing Center
put together this crimping device, or dimpling device, for us — it's a
custom-built machine — to try and cut the production time down, in this case dramatically.
On one of our products, we have a hinge, which we insert into stainless tubing with a sleeve
that locks over it, or slides over it, to lock it, for either
tensioning or support purposes in marine canvas framing. And so we've been slowed tremendously
in the manufacture of this, so we came to the AMC through the KTA, the Knowledge Transfer
Alliance, here at the university. And it looks like they put
together a tremendous machine that's going to cut our labor time down to probably 5 percent
of what we had before.”
Belding: “John, he may end up needing more manufacturing if he's going to do a bigger
production lot. It depends on how big his company grows, but this'll be able to handle
everything that they're able to make here for quite some time, probably. I
mean, usually companies come to us with a problem that they can't go anywhere else to
get fixed. They need something designed that's you know, fairly specialized for their operation,
so they'll come to us and say, 'Hey, can you have students help us
out and build a device that'll do what fits our needs?' and that's what we end up doing.
But we basically quote the project just like any other company would, and then the amount
of time and effort that it takes to do that is what the customer ends
up paying. Because they're working with students that are engineering that are learning to
do the process, so there is a cost advantage to doing that.”