James Hewlett, industrial designer at Repose Furniture, describes the previous production situation. “Each chair has 20-30 T-Nuts. We were using tap-in T-Nuts, but they could easily fall out during production. So we also had to staple a piece of card over the T-Nut to keep it in place. Both were manual operations and took a lot of time.”
With the support of David Elcocks, production & development director at Repose Furniture, Hewlett looked at ways to improve the production process. He approached Jet Press and sent samples of the materials to be used. Jet Press returned them with Sigma Rivet T-Nuts inserted.
It was clear a Rivet T-Nut Machine would be right for Repose Furniture.
Hewlett said: “Everything went smoothly. Jet Press had the machine in stock and came out, installed it and gave us the training. When we needed support, the Jet Press engineer came out despite the COVID situation, and everything was sorted out. We are very happy with the process”.
He pointed out another benefit of the Rivet T-Nuts that were supplied. “These Rivet T-Nuts are flared so it takes the bolt better. No more cross-threading now”.
Repose Furniture is using the Table-Top T-Nut Insertion Machine. This machine is capable of up to 1,000 Rivet T-Nut insertions per hour. Currently Repose uses it for the chairs that are made using computer numerical control (CNC) machines, around a third of its current production.
Hewlett adds: “The machines are great. We save at least five seconds per insertion, and the savings soon added up. They are very easy to use and the training was very simple. Once we start using the machine for all our production, we may look at an additional machine”.
Repose Furniture will benefit from free regular servicing as long as it keeps using Sigma T-Nuts supplied by Jet Press.
