Fastener Manufacturing Inspection Solution
Posted by Steve Maves on Fri, Dec 30, 2011 @ 04:46 PM
Fastener manufacturing companies and their customers face a common challenge, how to insure that a process is fed with all the same fasteners. If the wrong fastener is mixed into a shipment and fed into an automated assembly machine, it can cause more than just damage and rework on one part, it can also damage the tooling of the assembly machine, causing a longer period of downtime, and extensive repairs. Even a handful of these incidents can justify the cost of an inspection system, not to mention the intangible costs like loss of customer goodwill.
PPT Vision has extensive experience in the fastener inspection industry. PPT Vision smart cameras and software are used to measure various important parameters, including overall width and length, thread pitch, and head diameter. These insure high quality, rejecting any fasteners of the wrong type for 100% of the fasteners delivered, and run at the high rates typical of the fastener manufacturing industry.
The software is set up to inspect parts on an indexing dial machine for part sorting. The machine feeds and seperates individual parts. The machine includes a PC based operator interface so that users can see the products under inspection. It includes operator screens that show all measured parameters for each part, and engineering screens to allow changes in tolerance, and calibration of the system in either English or Metric units. Inspections can be setup and modified in the same operator interface that monitors the production. The hardware consists of a minimum of a single Smart Camera with a back lighted image of the part showing in silhouette as shown in the image below. Additional views, such as a top view provide information like head diameter and head type.
If you have fastener inspection challenges, please contact us, we can help.