A leading British manufacturer of orthopaedic implants and surgical instrumentation has installed a Guyson Multiblast RSB blast machine for cleaning off hydroxyapatite and titanium coating ‘overspray’ from its cup and stem implant fixture masks, which become encrusted with coating when its medical implants undergo Vacuum Plasma Spraying.
This automated blast cleaning process also has the added advantage of removing a time consuming and arduous manual blasting process from the workplace.
The company turned to Guyson, the industrial finishing equipment manufacturer, for a solution as it was looking to improve throughput on a manual blasting operation. The cleaning process was being undertaken using a suction fed manual blast cabinet and could take anything up to 30 minutes to clean each fixture mask free from overspray, prior to it being reused. The fixture mask is used to hold the component and at the same time mask a selected area whilst the component is thermal sprayed with either hydroxyapatite or titanium coatings. The automated Multiblast RSB (Rotating Spindle Blast) system achieves a perfect clean finish in the required time, with virtually no operator involvement, leaving the operator to perform other duties.
The machine can now undertake the cleaning process in a fraction of the time per unit, to a consistent, uniform standard and deliver 14 clean components at one go. This Multiblast system is fitted with a PLC/HMI. This gives full operational control over virtually all machine variables and enables through a simple menu system for a ‘recipe’ to be set-up with differing process requirements such as traverse, oscillation and airwash speed, start and finish gun positions etc.
