Rockman Industries, a part of the Hero Group, is a leading supplier of aluminium die casting components, machined & painted assemblies. With two-wheeler alloy wheel penetration reaching as high as 90 % of the market, Rockman Industries is going full throttle to make the most of this growing demand. Auto Tech Review recently visited the company’s Bawal facility to know more about its operations and manufacturing prowess.
Rockman Industries’ Bawal facility has been producing alloy wheels at a rather feverish pace. Starting from raw materials to a finished product, the batch of alloy wheels passes through the manufacturing line and follows a 12-hr cycle at Rockman Industries’ Bawal facility. Built on a land spanning across five acre, this facility rolls out a fresh batch of around 200 units in approximately 43 min, and a cumulative 3,500 sets of alloy wheels in three operational shifts a day.
Out of the cumulative annual capacity of 5.6 mn alloy wheels rolled out by the company, the Bawal facility manufactures 1.8 mn units of 12-inch and 18-inch diameter wheels, with the remaining contributed by Rockman’s Haridwar facility.
Rockman imports raw material for its alloy wheels in the form of ingots under the A356 nomenclature of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). The primary alloy ingots are checked with the spectrometer for their chemistry. Once a quality check of ingots is undertaken, they are subjected to two melting towers, which operate at 650-700 °C to convert ingots into molten metal. The liquid is then passed through degassing operation, where inert gases like nitrogen are passed through the metal. The operation gets rid of trapped gases like hydrogen in metal and avoids development of porosity during casting of wheels. Two-wheeler alloy wheels follow different nomenclatures for front and rear alloy wheel. Thus, Rockman’s engineers conduct similar wheel processing in the same line for monitoring quality levels.
This story is from the February 2019 edition of Auto Tech Review.
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This story is from the February 2019 edition of Auto Tech Review.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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