Quality and economy - Precision gears in mass customisation

The times in which automation was equated with standardisation are long past. The dictate of the moment: mass customisation. Custom-tailored gears with high cost-efficiency are in demand as never before. Nabtesco, the world’s largest and most renowned manufacturer of precision cycloidal gears, offers a high-end portfolio, a modular system, exceptionally high production capacities, and highly automated processes, in order to achieve excellent mass customisation.

Precision gears made to measure

A high level of modularity is provided in particular by the gears of the following series: Neco^® (solid shaft servo gears), Neco^®HT (high-torque gears for heavy-duty use) and RD-C (hollow shaft gears with three mounting variants). The combination of standardised elements facilitates the use of numerous defined interfaces for a broad spectrum of requirements. This allows maximum flexibility in the motor connection, cost-effective large-scale production and high availability, with faster delivery times. Within a very short time, the customer receives an individual gear unit that is custom-tailored to the application while offering the economy of large-scale production.

Maximum precision and power density

Worldwide, well over twelve million Nabtesco gear units are in use. The precision cycloidal gears feature not only high precision (max. hysteresis loss of 0.5 to 1 arcmin), but also minimal wear throughout the service life, outstanding shock resistance (up to 500% of the rates torque) and excellent dynamic behaviour, which is a guarantee for efficiency, performance and reliability. Moreover, the simplicity concept reduces the complexity of the overall system and minimises susceptibility to faults.

Whether the requirement is for flexible handling and machining tasks or dynamic pick-and-place applications: Cycloidal gears boost performance in the transmission of motions and forces, and they are the top choice for all handling and positioning tasks in production, assembly and packaging applications.

Custom-tailored gears in large quantities

Nabtesco manufactures more than one million gear units per year – both in one-off and large-scale production. The highly automated production process, which is based on Japanese principles such as poka-yoke (fail-safing) and kaizen (continuous improvement), is oriented toward maximum efficiency and consistently high quality. The construction of a third production site in Hamamatsu, Japan will double the company’s production output to two million precision gears by 2030 – an ideal scenario to meet the surging demand for automation solutions.