Weiss, a manufacturer of automation solutions, needed a reliable and efficient way to measure their production output, especially cam drives. Through the thread and gear wheel of the cam, massive driving forces are translated into fine rotational motor movements of the rotary indexing table and parts of the linear assembly system. The need for accurate measurement was therefore paramount.
At this point of time, the cam drives had to be tested in two separate runs: Once on a gear measurement device and a second time on a coordinate measuring machine for the remaining geometry.
With production orders rapidly expanding in 2014, they found their current existing measuring procedures would soon reach a bottleneck, and being unable to keep up with the increased demand was a very real possibility.
The company set out to nip the problem in the bud. “We were looking for a high-precision and extremely fast high-end coordinate measuring machine with a large measurement range which would also be an extremely powerful gear measurement centre for our cams,” explained Marius Grosse, quality manager at Weiss.
Precision & Speed
They found what they were looking for with two measurement machines from Hexagon: the Leitz PMM-F and the Leitz Reference HP bridge measuring machine.
The Leitz PMM-F offered some advantages over their previous measurement methods. The coordinate measuring machine (CMM) was designed to test medium-sized components and gears accurately and quickly, with a maximum permissible error for measurement range lying within a temperature range of 18 to 22 deg C at 2.3 + L/400 μm. Working with a rotary table meant no more centring and alignment of gears, and the machine was also able to measure gears on long shafts up to 3,000mm in length.
However, the primary CMM used for gear measurement was the Leitz Reference HP. Its LSP-S2 3D scanning system enabled both fast single-point probing for all typical measuring tasks, as well as high-speed scanning for form and profile measurements.
Measurement Options
The deciding factor was the Quindos software. With the software installed, the CMMs could measure over 30 types of gears: cylindrical gears, straight and spiral bevel gears, cylindrical worms, stepping gears, coupling gears, gear racks, curvic couplings and more. To measure them, only the respective parameters need to be entered. All traversal paths, probes and scan lines are generated automatically. The CMMs were able to keep up with increased production, and are still in use presently.
When it comes to complex gear measurement, slow processes and high programming expenditure can eat away at efficiency. Finding the right machine that suits the needs of production requirements can result in a dramatically improved measurement throughput.
APMEN Metrology & Design, Nov 2016
