InWin Factory Tour Computex 2014 Part 2

Peter Donnell / 10 years ago

Welcome to part two of our InWin factory tour, we’ve already seen how they produce their tooling components and injection moulds to create the plastic components of a chassis, so what’s next? Well since some of the biggest parts of a chassis are the panels, which come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, but also consist of many other small metal components such as hard drive bays, motherboard backplate etc, you need a lot of big machines to create them.

CNC machines are a big aspect of this and InWin have some pretty powerful ones that offer a multitude of cutting techniques, although the most popular here is certainly the laser cutters such as the one below.

The CNC machine above is churning out metal components, which are then stacked in these bays ready to work their way further down the production line.

The cut panels are still in the early states, but if I’m not mistaken, these are going to become server chassis.

Further down we have some even more impressive CNC machines, these two giant cutters can perform 64 different cuts thanks to its huge tool bank, allowing it to produce complete components and several of them at any one time.

Here you can see one of the parts it has made, which looks like a hard drive bay before it has been bent into shape. The giant machine has used multiple tools at once to cut the multitude of shapes required for this design.

There are a lot of tools needed for each production run, which are all kept on hand here. Obviously there are a few missing, since they’re in the machines which are currently cutting.

Here are even more tooling components which are used as templates for chassis components, just like the moulds we say in the first part of the tour, they’re huge and heavy, even those used for small components are likely a 100lbs and above.

This is one of the technical aspects of the production line, metal sheets are folded in a press by an engineer. Each fold has to be lined up by hand and done one at a time, so more complete chassis designs can take quite a while to perform.

This was easily one of the coolest things on the tour, a simple metal sheet starts its life here and is picked up by the suction cups above, before being passed along to the machine on the left.

It is then drilled, stamped, pressed and beaten by one machine at a time before being passed onto the next one in this long line. Each has their own job to perform and the final component is put in a stack all the was at the end of this row of machines.