This week at FABTECH, LestaUSA officially launched, forever changing the landscape of automated finishing across North American manufacturing and fabrication industries.
Day 2 and Day 3 of FABTECH are in the books. The days were nonstop and chock-full of new products, seminars, training, panel discussions, and obsessive Fitbit checking. But here are a few things that stood out while walking the halls of McCormick Place on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Big reveal: LestaUSA launches with breakthrough finishing automation
That might sound like hyperbole, but the self-learning finishing technology that LestaUSA is offering has never before been available in the United States.
It did, however, exist overseas, where Italian company Lesta began developing the technology in 2010. It just remained one of the industry’s best-kept secrets for the better part of the decade. That is until Tea, South Dakota-based DeGeest Steel Works, which has more than 40 years in metal fabrication, coating, welding, and, more recently, robotics, came across Lesta while researching options for automated finishing.
Needless to say, folks in the finishing and coating sectors visiting the LestaUSA FABTECH booth have been caught off guard with excitement. Visitors to the booth were also welcomed to try out the self-learning robot themselves.
"Even some of the equipment companies in the industry have come up and they're just like, 'Wow, what is this?’” said Derek DeGeest, president of DeGeest Steel Works and LestaUSA.
Here’s how Lesta’s self-learning technology works: An operator uses the weight-less finishing attachment to manually coat a part while the software records precise spray outputs, air ratios, and spray patterns. After that, the automation process kicks in and the robot coats part after part without any complicated programming.
"We thought that this was too good to be true,” said DeGeest. “So, we called [Lesta] up and said, 'Hey, what's the deal? I've never heard of this before. We know robots, and this can't be true.'"Before contacting Lesta, DeGeest hit roadblocks at every turn when trying to find an automated finishing solution.
"The problem was that we thought that it would be easy. We thought it would be just like a welding robot. Boy, were we wrong,” said DeGeest. “There are thousands of subtle decisions made by powder coaters and paint finishers that they don't even know they're doing. When you try to program that, it's just overwhelming."
The automated finishing options that were available stateside were only designed for industries like automotive, which used technology that had fixed programming to paint parts at massive volume. That simply wasn’t practicable – financially or operationally – for job shops like DeGeest, where procedures are frequently re-engineered to handle thousands of everchanging products and parts.
And when DeGeest asked around the finishing industry if what Lesta was offering was known in North America, no one knew about it. “I was blown away,” said DeGeest. “What happened? How has everyone missed this?”
So Lesta cofounder Emanuele Mazza flew DeGeest’s team to Europe and gave them tours of some of the 350 facilities that were using the self-learning coating technology.
“It was actually a good moment to meet each other,” said Mazza. “We were ready to open to other markets. It was our strategy to open in North America. We wanted to replicate the good success that we had [in Europe] and show what can be done with our solutions here. We were lucky because Derek and I met at the right moment.”
With that came the development of LestaUSA, which Derek DeGeest has been named president. LestaUSA is currently building a manufacturing facility that will produce, manufacture, and assemble self-learning robots in the U.S. But DeGeest also expects LestaUSA to be on the forefront of training everyone in the industry how it properly utilizes the technology.
“We want to be able to educate the market on how to use these robots and the industrial applications because no one's really done it before,” he said. “It isn't a magic bullet in itself. You still need to work with your local distributor, your paint or powder provider, and the equipment. We all have to work together to really create a successful system."