To further expand its services for the North American market Airborne, the technology leader in automated and digital manufacturing of advanced composites, is pleased to announce the appointment of Eastman Machine Company as a Preferred Reselling Partner. Eastman has rights to sell Airborne Automated Kitting solutions to the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
Joe Summers, Commercial Director of Airborne said “Partnering with Eastman adds major value for our customers in North America. Eastman shares Airborne’s ambitions to make the cutting room more efficient, with the ply cutter at the centre of turning materials into cut shapes with the highest possible efficiency of materials and labour. We’re excited to see how this collaboration will bring even more advanced services to customers in North America”.
Eastman Machine Company is a fifth-generation, family-operated manufacturer of cutting machines and material handling solutions. Working in tandem with industry engineers, Eastman designs and builds composite cutting machinery that is reliable, accurate, and versatile. Eastman is committed to manufacturing industrial solutions proven to be simpler to operate, less expensive to maintain, and customized specific to cutting and handling fiberglass, carbon, aramid reinforcement fibers, and other engineered fabrics.
“We are excited about our joint partnership with Airborne,” says Amy Denning, VP of North American Sales at Eastman. “It is a massive step forward for American manufacturers looking to maximize operational efficiency in the cutting room.”
Automated Kitting solutions
Airborne’s Automated Kitting solutions reduce production cost of composite manufacturing by maximising material yield (through optimised material nesting), and solve the challenge of sorting and sequencing plies from a complex nest into kits ready for laminating, with minimal operator involvement. Systems can be “stand-alone” where multiple ply cutters can feed a single system, or “integrated” with the novel capability to pick directly from the bed of the ply cutter. The systems are “plug and play” without the need for specialised programming. Airborne’s software generates the robot code directly using information from the nest data, enabling regular or dynamic nesting with the Kitting solution adapting “on the fly”.
