Bellows / Sheaths / Teach & Miscellaneous

RCC offers multiple variations of its know-how in designing protections for robots. Bellows, sheaths, teachs and custom-made creations, RCC will adapt to your processes through its design office.

The protective bellows we manufacture

A bellows cover is a folded fabric sleeve that follows a moving part and keeps everything else out: dust, chips, spatter, coolant, paint mist, water. On a robot it usually protects a wrist, an axis or a linear travel. Because the fold pattern has to match the stroke, the compressed length and the clearance around the part, we do not sell a catalogue size. We build to your dimensions.

Three families cover most requests. Round and conical bellows wrap robot axes, with a compression ratio chosen so that the folds never touch the moving part. Flat bellows, rectangular or three-sided, suit straight travels and tight installations where a round section would not fit. Split bellows close with a zip or a hook-and-loop strip along their length, which lets a maintenance team fit or replace them without dismantling the machine. That last point decides many retrofits: a shutdown of twenty minutes instead of half a day.

Choosing the bellows fabric

The fabric is what makes a bellows last, and it is chosen against the environment, not against a price list. A foundry or a welding cell calls for a coated fabric that resists hot particles and spatter; a paint booth calls for a surface that releases overspray and can be wiped; a food or pharmaceutical line calls for a smooth, washable material that holds up to cleaning products. Temperature range, chemical exposure, abrasion and the number of cycles per hour all change the answer, and we have set out the reasoning in our guide to protective materials and industrial environments.

Our design office selects the material with you, on the basis of the process rather than the machine reference. If you already run a protection that fails too early, send us the worn part: the way it tears tells us more than a specification sheet.

Sheaths, teach pendant covers and custom parts

Alongside bellows we make sheaths for cable bundles, dress packs and hose assemblies, which take the abrasion instead of the cables themselves, and sleeves, bellows and jackets for full robot bodies, as well as teach pendant covers that keep a control unit usable in a dirty cell while leaving the screen and the keys readable. The same workshop also produces one-off pieces: curtains, aprons, enclosure panels, covers for peripheral equipment. If a moving part needs protecting and no standard product fits, it goes through the design office.

From your drawing to the installed part

You send a drawing, a photograph or the worn part. We come back with a proposal, a material and a price. Manufacturing is done in France, in our Toul workshop, and we can install on site and handle repair, cleaning and replacement afterwards. Most of our customers start with one machine and extend to the rest of the line once the first protection has survived a full production season.