Company Name: Vauxhall Motors Ltd

Sector: Automotive & ancillary industry

Material: Steel

Process: MIG/MAG

Initial contact and short description:
Vauxhall Motors Ltd. is a member of General Motors’ (GM) UK and Irish family of companies, which includes Saab GB, Opel Ireland and GMM Luton Vehicles as wholly owned operations and Chevrolet UK (41 % owned).
Vauxhall’s car manufacturing site at GMM Ellesmere Port is one of Europe’s most modern car plants and produces the new Astra for Vauxhall and Opel. In 2004 the plant produced 147,918 vehicles.
After the German colleagues reported € 150,000 savings per year, the UK plant due to reduction of re-work, maintenance and wear part usage, coupled with faster speeds, the UK plant made contact.

They now use: 4 CMT Brazing on the car body (1.0mm CuSi3), 4 CMT Steel Welding on the door frames (1.2mm Steel, 100% Co2), 1 CMT Test cell.

New customer: yes

Solution:
About 300 of 1200 bodies per day had to be reworked due to unsufficient Brazing seams or spatter. In addition to that weld nuts had to be covered manually. Losses of production time had been caused by weld spatter into the torches.
By using Fronius CMT - Brazing rework has been reduced by 80% (10 seconds per car). Covering of weld nuts is not longer needed. The Brazing re-work station now stands empty. 2 manual workers per shift have been relocated to other jobs.
CLOOS Quinto power sources with TBI planetary drive torches were replaced with Fronius CMT equipment.
The initial trial proved hugely successful in teh Brazing application, where the spatter free CMT process has completely removed the need for a torch clean. Contact tip life has been substantially increased and wire feeding of 1.0mm CuSi3 from marathon packs is now 100% reliable.

A saving of around 9,000 pounds has been reported - purely in CuSi3 wire!
The changing over to 1005 Co2 in the door hinge application has yielded a yearly saving of around 20,000 pounds (4 systems).
Used products:
1pcs Robacta Drive CMT
1pcs TransPuls Synergic 3200 CMT