A large Midwest Die Cast company leverages Advanced Quality Inspection Technologies to verify multiple bore diameters, True Position of a critical hole location, and flatness of a mating surface to achieve 100% inspection in less than a 60-second cycle time.
CHALLENGE
A global leader in automotive die-cast components was charged with delivering 100% inspected parts while maintaining profitability. Their current process was labor-intensive and time consuming – requiring either manual (handheld air gaging) or CMM inspection. Additional key inspection challenges included extremely tight tolerances and diameter checks on stepped bores, repeatability of inspection and correlation to CMM data.
SOLUTION
Component Engineering partnered with Mahr Metrology to design an auto-gage that addressed key inspection challenges and streamlined the overall quality inspection process. Our auto-gage solution integrated Mahr air gaging to provide accurate and repeatable variable data for a total of six (6) bore diameters. A TruPosition® probe and LVDT’s were also used to check the mating surface profile, alignment, and hole True Position, all within the required cycle time of <60 seconds. The inspection work cell was also designed to enable future robotic part load and unload, freeing up skilled staff to support other parts of the production process.
OUTCOMES AND CUSTOMER BENEFITS
- Improved Efficiencies – By providing an automated inspection process we avoided the labor-intensive requirement for every part to be inspected by hand or via CMM. Also, by greatly reducing the inspection cycle time, we have enabled future production expansion without incremental quality inspection expenses.
- Accurate Quality Outputs – Correlation work gave our customer confidence that each part was being inspected to the same criteria and standards of the traditional CMM process.
- Repeatability and Reproducibility – <10% on all features – tolerances from .03mm to 1mm.
Air Gage inspection technology is well established, and offers great opportunities for non-contact inspection options that measure both dimensional and geometric tolerances in metallic and non-metallic materials and can verify part dimensions meet tight tolerances in high-speed manufacturing applications.
Combined with Component Engineering’s expertise and experience with designing inspection solutions for precision measurement and verification of GD&T requirements, you can be confident you are delivering quality parts to your customers 100% of the time.
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