WATCH: Ford South Africa created a braai robot that cooks in 12 minutes!
Other than braai meat, it can also pour drinks and serving a full tray to people!
It is officially braai season, right? We love summer for the weather but also the fun we can have with family and friends. Ford South Africa created something that would be perfect for a large group of people during this time - a braai robot.
Yes, you read right! A whole robot which can cook braai meat and more...
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The Silverton Assembly Plant took one of their old Fords and assembled robots using decommissioned tools and created the automatic braai machine.
"But how does it work?", you may ask.
The TCF BBQ is programmed to place the grill loaded with meat on one of three braai stations surrounding the unit and then turn the grill after a certain time.
It can also offload the grill from the braai onto the braai station, which you will see in the below video was created using a scrapped Ford Ranger Wildtrak bumper.
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Another cool feature of the TBF BBQ is that it can still do what other cars do like flash the bakkie’s headlights, indicate, beep the horn, and flash the parking lights.
The TCF BBQ (Braai Boerewors Quickly) is perfect for a large crowd as it can braai 120 pieces of meat in 12 minutes! Can you imagine?
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The area manager, Claude Roux, from the plant’s trim and chassis and final line (TCF), came up with the idea of transforming one of the robots into a braai bot.
“This was when the innovation and curiosity of that ‘small child’ inside all of us came to life,” he shared.
“We took our knowledge of braaing and our understanding of manufacturing vehicles and married the two to create a machine with the ability to pick up and manipulate the meat on a grill.”
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The used a Fanuc robot that was meant to be discarded, along with scrap metal, discarded wood pallets for a base, metal trolleys for braais, and a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) for the controls.
“We had a qualified electrician, qualified fitter, PLC programmer, and a controls specialist working on it for around four weeks during the plant shutdown,” Roux added.
Look at how incredible the end result was:
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We know that Keri Miller is definitely even more proud to be a Ford driver because of this creation!
Main Image Courtesy: North West Ford - Upington