Welding robots are used for high volume repetitive welding applications

They don't take sick days, holidays, RDO's, smoko breaks, toilet breaks or lunch breaks. Once a welding robot is set up it can literally work flat out non-stop twenty four seven.

A robotic welding arm does not fatigue like humans do.

These things are often rated at doing 50,000 hours. And providing you can keep feeding welding wire and supplying power to the robot, it will sit there and all weld day and night.

For a welding robot to work properly and make satisfactory welds it is very important that the parts you are going to weld are very accurate and dimensionally tolerant.

It is said that even before you attempt to use a welding robot you must be able to jig up your work piece and hold it so that the path the robot has to follow is tracking within one width of the diameter of the mig welding wire that you are using.

Now that's a pretty tight tolerance to hold.

This means that you are going to have to double check and make sure that your parts to be robotically welded are dead accurate.

This is why a lot of manufacturers will have all their steel parts later cut or high-definition plasma cut, as these cutting processes will allow your parts to hold very tight tolerances.

Another area that you must seriously look into is that of a quality mig welding wire.

A robotic quality mig welding wire will offer a far superior reliability to the production line than that of a cheaper and lower quality welding wire.

It is very important to understand that not all welding wires are the same. This is especially true for welding robot applications.

In these robotic welding situations you don't go and spend big dollars on buying a robotic welding cell, robot and power source for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then turn around and buy the cheapest mig wire you can find.

It's in these welding robot applications where you really do notice a difference between a good wire and bad wire.

These are the situations where contact tips physically wear out from the welding wire feeding through them. Normally contact tips just get thrown away because of human error.

A welding robot will track, follow and hold its arm steady without fail every single time.

In comparison, a human will be all over the place.

We as "employees" also use our welding torch as a hammer, knocking off spatter and slag etc. This in turn ruins the nozzle, contact tip and even in the neck of the torch.

To operate and run a welding robot successfully you also need to make sure that the welding wire coming out at the end of the gun is always going to be in the same place.

As welding wire is coiled on to a drum or spool when you unwind it as it you are using it, there is always going to be a curve and twist in the wire.

There is actually two things we can talk about here and they are the "wire cast" and the wire in "helix".

See the mig welding wire page about that, it talks about a robotic quality mig wire.

It really is amazing what a welding robot can do in terms of quality, production, reliability and most importantly making you more money.

One of the world's leaders in robotic welding technology and also welding power supplies, machines and mig welding torches is OTC Daihen.

See a welding robot video here:

Link to OTC Daihen welding robots.

You might also like to check out the mig welding page.