PowerINSPECT Software Helps Assure Quality At Every Step

At Gold Shield Indiana Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of US recreational vehicle and manufactured housing market leader Fleetwood Enterprises Inc., a portable Romer/CimCore CMM with Delcam’s PowerINSPECT inspection software has made quality an everyday part of manufacturing.

The company’s consistently high quality since it added the new facilities has also helped it land other business, including decks and hulls for personal watercraft, housings for the medical field and various parts for heavy trucks. Compared with the industries previously served by Gold Shield, these products have tighter specifications with narrower tolerance bands plus stricter requirements for accuracy and repeatability in the measuring systems on which they rely.

Two very different approaches to quality are required by Gold Shield’s unusual mix of high-volume long runs and low-volume short runs. In the former, the portable CMM is used to design, build and calibrate fixtures, especially for drilling mounting holes for hardware such as lights, locks and licence plates. In short run, low volume work, the portable CMM becomes a production set-up tool to locate and scribe lines for manually drilling hardware locator holes.

This has been achieved with fewer people, too. “When I started here in 1998,” recalled David L. Wisel, Quality Manager, “there were 14 people in this department. Now there are just eight and we do far more measurements to far tighter specifications.”

“We now are regularly asked to bid on business by companies that a few years ago would not have considered getting moulded components from an open mould supplier,” Mr. Wisel said. “The old manual methods we used before owning the Romer/CimCore machine were inaccurate, slow, incomplete, inconsistent, and didn’t repeat very well. Our customers simply demand higher levels of accuracy.”

“One of the big advantages to the Romer/CimCore system is the Delcam software’s flexibility,” Mr. Wisel said. ”PowerINSPECT allows us to measure things by creating artificial datums. If we need to, that capability will let us measure parts with no fixed or flat surfaces.” This is the norm for a lot of Gold Shield’s products.

He added that PowerINSPECT readily converts coordinate references from the ordinary X, Y and Z of engineering to the boat builders’ equivalent of T, B and H. These stand for Total hull length, Beam or hull width, and Height from the keel.

Mr. Wisel and the quality team at Gold Shield are implementing flexible dimensional measurement methods on the factory floor and making them integral to production. This builds quality into the production process rather than trying to inspect quality in afterwards. “Achieving these new levels of precision has opened doors for us to new markets and new customers,” concluded Mr. Wisel. “Now for the first time we’re talking to an impressive list of quality-conscious manufacturers of personal watercraft and heavy trucks.”

SOURCE: Delcam PLC