shaping the future of metrology - Brown & Sharpe

Guelph, Ontario
Gantry CMM Cuts Inspection
Time At Engel Canada
nstallation of a gantry-type coordinate
measuring machine at Engel Canada
Inc., Guelph, Ontario, has helped the company
reduce overall inspection time, and
helped assemblers build optimized injection
molding machines.
Engel is a major manufacturer of injection
molding equipment. Products include
injection molding machines, automation
equipment, and software for
molding thermoplastics, thermosets,
BMC, LSR, elastomers, and powdered
metals.The company also manufactures
systems designed for advanced processing
technologies such as gas melt, lost
core, and textile melt.
The Engel Canada Inc. facility specializes
in the manufacture of 35 to 200 ton
hydraulic, tiebar-less and 150 to 500 ton
toggle injection molding machines,
along with sprue pickers, pick-and-place
handling devices, servo-driven robots,
mold mount and change systems, and
production monitoring systems.
To help reduce inspection time, the
company installed a Brown & Sharpe
DEA BETA SP gantry coordinate measuring
machine on the machine shop floor
to handle large molding machine components,
such as platens that are about a
meter and a half long by 3 I
⁄ 4 of a meter
wide and weigh up to 5,000 kilograms.
“Our installation is somewhat unique
in that we don’t have a surface plate or
table that we place the parts on,” said
Steve Schock, Engel Canada Quality Man-
ager. “We put the
parts right on the
floor.The foundation
that we’re
using formerly
supported a machining
center,
and subsequent
vibration tests confirmed
that we’ve
got a stable pad.”
In the past, Engel
Canada did use a surface plate.
Inspectors would stand large machine
components on an 8' x 6' x 18' table and
check dimensions with a height gage. On
a “first off” inspection of a major part,
like a platen, more than 1,000 data points
might have to be collected to gather the
dimensional information necessary for
process correction. Dimensional tolerances
are tight. Even on large parts,
squareness and parallelism tolerances run
in the neighborhood of 0.03 mm. It was
a time-consuming process, taking up to
four hours for some parts.
More Data
More Quickly
The installation of the BETA CMM has
reduced the setup inspection time for
these larger parts to about one hour.
The Brown & Sharpe DEA BETA is a
medium-sized gantry CMM designed to
operate with high accuracy and reliability
in an open shop
environment.The
aluminum machine
structure
quickly adapts
to temperature
changes, and
scale readings
are not affected
by changes in the
machine structure
caused by thermal gradients.
Fully covered ways
protect the machine from airborne
contaminants.
In the Engel Canada machine shop,
the BETA SP is installed adjacent to a
large grinder—a condition that is about
as harsh as it can get for precision measuring
equipment, according to Schock.
“We’ve noticed no degradation in reliability
or accuracy because of the CMM’s
location, however,” he said.
The open design of the BETA SP allows
easy integration of existing material handling
equipment. Large molding machine
components are moved to the CMM by an
overhead crane and can be easily placed
within its measuring envelope.
Most of the production runs at Engel
Canada are short, averaging about 10
pieces, so it is important to quickly communicate
inspection results from a first
off piece to the machine operator so that
he can make offset adjustments to his
machine to keep parts within tolerance
A Brown & Sharpe DEA BETA SP gantry at Engel Canada Inc. is set up to check the dimensions
of a large molding machine component. The CMM has significantly reduced inspection time for
these large parts.
for the rest of the run.
“The CMM gives us that capability,”
said Jeff Bratt, Engel Canada Machine
Shop Quality Control Supervisor. “We
make a printout of the inspection results,
mark it up, and send it back to the operator
with the information he needs to correct
his process. Before we had this capability,
it was a lot more difficult to
communicate process information to the
operator,” he said.
Bratt added that the CMM has also
helped the company detect, much sooner
than before, if a machine tool requires
preventative maintenance because of its
inability to hold tolerance.
Best Fit Means
Better Assembly
Engel uses a modular concept to
build its machines. Design flexibility is
applied to meet certain applications by
configuring standard machine components
to suit specific needs.
“We don’t build a standard machine
here,” Bratt said. “Our market niche is the
custom mold market.We have a standard
base, but we have over 500 options that
we put into machines, therefore each is
quite different when it leaves the plant.”
This modular approach to machine
construction requires that sub-assemblies
be checked for proper fit.
“We use the BETA to sort those components
to give us the best assembly for
certain applications,” said Bratt. “With
the CMM, we’ve been able to put some
smaller machines entirely within the
measuring envelope and check the parallelism
of components with the machine
clamped up.
“If we’re running into a problem
with the machine functioning as it
The
BETA SP is installed
adjacent to a large
grinder—a condition
that is about as harsh as
it can get for precision
measuring equipment
should,
we can
now move the
whole machine assembly to the BETA and
perform some critical alignment checks
to make sure that components fit together
properly,” Bratt said.
As Engel Canada continues to grow
and ramp up the number of machines it
ships each year, there may be need for
additional coordinate measuring machines.
“We know what coordinate
metrology can do, and the payoff has
been rather fast,” Schock said. “In order
to meet future production demands, we
will be looking at replacing some other
surface plate tools with a small CMM to
handle smaller parts.” o
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