All Features
C. Martin Schuster
Foam Design Inc. of Lexington, Kentucky, builds a wide range of foam parts, including inserts for headliners used to protect against injuries in the event of a collision. Inspecting these components with a CMM was a tedious and error-prone process because of the difficulty involved in making…
Quality Digest
By adding a laser probe to a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), Sonaca, a large Belgian aerospace-structures supplier, has greatly increased the completeness of its inspections, obtaining full documentation of every component’s geometry. When the company inspected sheet metal components in the…
Pressure decay has been the most widely used method of leak testing in manufacturing production lines for decades. The process is uncomplicated, inexpensive and easily automated. Air is simply injected into a test object and any decrease in air pressure over time signifies a leak. However, the…
Claes Nylander
Leak testing is an essential element in product quality testing for a wide range of industries. From the automotive industry to heating, ventilation and air conditioning manufacturing, countless products and parts have to be tested for tightness in order to meet specifications and be granted the…
Bill Chambers
So you have a great product, and there’s a great demand for it. You’ve addressed how to quickly produce it, and now you need to ensure the quality—fast. You can’t afford delays and need to keep costs down. One way to accomplish this is with fixture gaging, a simple, easy-to-use quality control…
Rick Hudgell
As industry standards increase, so too does the demand for flexibility in specialized gaging procedures. Because there’s no room for error, choosing the right contact point or styli is paramount in conforming to the organization’s high quality standards. Accuracy can be jeopardized by any number of…
Many customers come to Hobson & Motzer seeking a solution for what others have claimed is impossible. Established in 1912 and based in Durham, Connecticut, Hobson & Motzer engineers manufacturing processes and designs tooling to produce seemingly impossible parts for companies worldwide.…
Test and measurement equipment (T&ME) must be periodically calibrated to ensure it’s operating within its specified parameters. Of course, the uncertainty of the system used to calibrate the equipment shouldn’t add appreciable error to this process.Test and measurement equipment (T&ME) must…
Quality Digest
Shortwave infrared (SWIR) imaging is quietly earning a growing place in industrial machine vision for quality inspection. SWIR imagers, sometimes also referred to as NIR imagers, can see objects and events that vision and thermal cameras cannot. Moreover, they’re’ smaller and lighter than all…
Gary Card
How many dimensional data points are enough to accurately describe a part feature? The key to answering this question is understanding the stability of the manufacturing process. In general, components should be measured only as often as required to ensure the stability of manufacturing processes.…
Gary Card
Coordinate measuring machines gather data by means of a probe or sensor. Conventional CMMs equipped with touch-trigger probes can use a stitch-scanning method to record point streams from part surfaces. In stitch scanning, the CMM lifts the probe head from the surface of the part, moves it slightly…