PTG assembly line in Lozorno. (source: SITA)
The Dutch company, PTG, has built a new assembly plant for car wheels in the P3 industrial park in Lozorno near Bratislava. It will assemble tyres and discs into complete car wheels for all the car types manufactured at the nearby carmaker Volkswagen Slovakia. The lines are now under trial operation. Production in the new plant will be officially launched on May 29, the SITA newswire reported.
“Assembling wheels is challenging and physically demanding work, since the weight of one assembled wheel can be up to 35 kilograms,” company representatives said as cited by SITA. “The help of machines significantly improves employees’ working conditions.”
Thanks to technology and robots, the new assembly line will substitute up to 80 percent of the work of the employees, as the robotic line works with various combinations of tires and wheels. One assembled wheel leaves the assembly line every 18 seconds. The plant employs about one hundred people.
The robots were specially developed and designed for this plant, making it the most developed facility of its kind in the whole of Europe.
The assembly hall is linked to production at Volkswagen Slovakia and provides the timely delivery of tyre-fitted wheels directly to the production facility for cars, according to the specifications of individual brands.
“A realised delivery is set at 360-minute cycles, this time includes the entry of an order into the system, the preparation of the wheels, their assembly and subsequent delivery directly to the car factory,” said the executive director of PTG Slovakia, Roman Prokeš. Wheels for 2,000 vehicles per day can be assembled in the hall which has a total area of 17,000 square metres. The warehouse capacity is 40,000 tires.
