• SCC have decided to take the proactive step in working towards streamlining our production process with both our Aerospace and Formula One customers by introducing a state of the art Absolute Romer 3D scanning arm to our inspection department.
• Having and in-house 3D inspection service at SCC sets us apart, by providing an AS9100 Rev.D Quality Management Standard inspection service, providing both geometric and dimension tolerance reporting.
• This service offering adds another string to our bow and enable us to be more flexible for our customers allowing them to decide whether they want full traceability and reporting throughout the entire production process, or to pick and choose the exact services they require.
• Our inspection staff have had full professional training and been operational for the last 6 months with our existing customers.

Background

3D inspection is incredibly important in industries such as Formula One and Aerospace where there are extremely stringent safety and performance criteria. And a considerable amount of work has gone into the design phase to ensure that the final product meets all the criteria. In Formula One for example, a 0.1mm deflection in the tail end of a front wing endplate, can have a knock-on effect on downstream components and consequently the overall down force or handling ability of the car. It’s also incredibly important in the aerospace industry where passengers’ lives are reliant on the plane’s systems and parts to all work in synchronisation with each other.

We found that there was and increasing need for in-house quality inspection at SCC to due to the rapid turnaround times of the Formula One and stringent quality requirement demanded from the aerospace industry and felt that we need to take a proactive step in working towards streamlining our production process with both our Aerospace and Formula One customers.

Capability

Our Absolute Romer 7-Axis 3D scanning arm come with both a probe for registering surfaces, holes, pins, and any other significant datum point or feature; and a 3D laser digitiser to trace the 3D component for analysis in the Polyworks inspection software. This make it great for the quality inspection of aerodynamic components where it would otherwise be difficult or unreliable to take manual measurements from.

For example, a 0.2mm bucking of a curved surface may not be immediately obvious through manual inspection hand tools and may even be wrongly identified as a trim shop error – where in reality it could have been due the machining and hand finishing of the pattern block, a slight deflection during the post curing stage or even over expansion of the tooling block, due to an Autoclave malfunction. But it’s having these extra tools available, the quality management systems in place and being thorough and committed to quality that help mitigate these issues and enable us to pin point and fix them if things don’t go to plan.

Our inspection staff have had full professional training in 3D quality inspection, work to AS9100 quality management standard and have been operational for 6 months with our existing customers.

The Absolute Romer has up to a 2.5m range and a 46 nanometer tolerance, so has the capability to perform quality checks on a wide variety of production components.

What does it mean for me?

We find that an increasing number of customers are becoming ‘design houses’ for their products, assembling products in-house and shipping out manufacturing work to companies like South Coast Composites to produce their lightweight vehicle components.

This is a fantastic opportunity and way for companies to scale quickly and get products made in time for tight deadlines, especially with Formula One customers.

This also means that there is a need for a quality control function at the customer’s facility to ensure that all components being manufactured by sub-contractor facilities are made to the correct specification, are in tolerance and will fit and work with the systems and mechanisms that make the product being built, function properly.

We now have a much wider scope for checking that tolerance is monitored at every stage of the production process and overall, this is turn means shorter lead-times for our customers to create, build and complete their products.

How to get access?

To find out more about the our production and ever developing services at South Coast Composite, click here to get in contact and we’ll find the right person for you to have chat with.