Tight tolerances are everywhere in manufacturing. How do you hold ±.0003″ in the bore of an aluminum casting? With the proper tools, gauges and approach it’s a daily occurrence for Contour Tool to hold these tolerances for our customers.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another contour tool short video on showing you some of the projects we’ve been working on for the past year. Today we’re gonna show you a part that we receive from a customer. It’s aluminum casting, and from the onset it doesn’t look like it’s that difficult of a part, but it’s all the internal workings that, uh, is the intricate part of this particular project. We had to come up with a way to work, hold this part in such a way that we can machine both the IDs and we’ll show that to you here in a minute. In one chucking there was always issues of non cleanup and alignment between the two bores, which caused problems. So we were able to design up a picture to hold this part and be able to attack both ends at the same time. In the same chucking.
If we looked at a cross section of a part, you’ll see the two bores that are in here. Now from the onset, that still doesn’t look difficult. However, these bores had to be held within plus or minus three tenths of an inch. And like I said, non cleanup was an issue with the customer. Uh, previously on these two bores, this kind of led us into a direction of investing in some high-end, uh, tooling in order to accomplish this. And after we did that, we were able to hold the tolerances, but we also had to invest in some high-end fix, uh, tooling. We also had to do some high-end gauging. And if you notice here we invested in a air probe system that allows us to check the bores to the plus or minus three times tolerance. We also had to hold a 16 micro finish, which we were able to hold anywhere from a eight to a 10 micro throughout the entire run. This is one of the projects that we have excelled in and we would like you to take a look at our website and take a look at some of our other projects that we’ve worked on and make contour tool your first place you stop. Thank you and everyone have a good day.