A TDA Buddy manipulator can help in several ways. Ergonomically a TDA Buddy manipulator can make heavy lifting effortless. Our unique neutral balance system makes heavy parts virtually weightless. A child could lift heavy parts and glide them through space with no stress or strain. Your employees will be safer and able to move heavy parts by themselves. Team lifting, where two or more employees are needed to move product, will be a thing of the past. Expense wise, your workers comp provider can give you lower rates when they see how you’re providing lift assist to your workers. From a product standpoint there will be no dropped parts which result in expensive scrap or rework.

TDA Buddy, Inc will gladly work with you to develop the best solution for your application. With almost 3000 TDA manipulators in service chances are very good that we’ve handled product just like yours. Our standard manipulators, Hoistipulators, articulating arms, and torque arms give us plenty of ways to provide you the perfect solution. Use our request a quote function and we’ll be in touch today.

Quite often we call our manipulators “Nobots” They look something like robots and have similar axis of motion but they aren’t motorized. We LOVE robots and work well with them but our manipulators are less expensive, usually only require shop air, don’t need programming or complicated maintenance and don’t need space hogging enclosures.

Our standard color is OSHA compliant safety orange. If your requirements differ we’ll gladly provide whatever you need.

Yes. TDA Buddy manipulators can be used outdoors if necessary but you should expect them to not stay looking as nice as if they were used indoors.

Depending on the application and space requirements our manipulators are mounted on a central floor column, a fork lift portable column, overhead, or on overhead precision rails.

Over 90% of our manipulators run on 80 PSI shop air with no electricity required.

Years and years! We regularly talk with customers who are using TDA Buddy manipulators 15-20 years after first being put in service. We’ve been building our rugged systems the same way for 28 years.

Our company started out as Technical Designs and Assemblies, Inc. Several years later on a follow up call to a customer we were speaking with a very satisfied operator who said “I used to have to call my buddy over there to help me lift these. Now this manipulator is my buddy and I don’t have to bother him.” Soon after we became TDA Buddy, Inc.

A manipulator is similar to a hoist in that it can lift things up and down but there are two very important differences. First, a manipulator can reach horizontally into spaces like presses or dunnage. A hoist only goes up and down and can’t reach in. Second, because a TDA Buddy manipulator holds your parts rigid in space, the tooling can pitch, roll, or yaw your parts for placing in a different orientation than pick up position.