Moulds for glass bottles receive quick approval

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HASCO Hasenclever GmbH + Co KG

BORIDE Engineered Abrasives

Renishaw plc

Nikon Metrology NV

Final inspection is touted as three times faster

The same CMM platform is used for quality control of all individual mould components after manufacture, a method that complements SPC (statistical process control) on the shop floor. Omco, which is accredited to the ISO 9001:2008 quality management system, derives significant savings in final inspection thanks to Nikon Metrology's Camio software, the supplier said. It enables programmers to produce a fully automatic measuring cycle directly from a part's CAD model. A touch probe mounted on the Renishaw PH10M indexing head feeds back the 3D data of each point as the cycle is executed.

Castings from either of Omco's two foundries in Belgium and Slovenia are CNC-turned and milled to produce the mould halves, but many other components also go into mould sets, such as blanks, baffles, blow heads, thimbles, funnels and distribution plates. This diversity increases the total number of parts that require inspecting to between 30 and 100, a number that is dependent on the size and complexity of the customer's blow-moulding equipment.

Previously, ever since the Iasi operation was set up at the end of 2005, conventional metrology equipment such as micrometers and vernier calipers had been used to measure the parts manually. The pre-existing CMM on site used a fixed touch-probing head and could not complete the measurements automatically, so it would have taken even longer to do the job. Therefore, operators would spend an entire eight-hour shift inspecting on average 30 mould parts each by hand.

Now, 100 pieces per shift can be inspected on the CMM by one operator, so there is a three-fold reduction in labour in the metrology department, another factor that helps to reduce the cost of mould production, Nikon said. Between 10 and 20 critical dimensions are measured on each part in cycles ranging from two to five minutes, and some 80% of mould components undergo such inspection. Batch size ranges from one or two test pieces through 40-off and up to 150-off.

Geantă noted that apart from speed and cost reductions, a further advantage of automated inspection is increased accuracy. “It is easy for a hand-gauging instrument to slip in use and with a tolerance of ±10 microns on a 30 mm diameter mould, for example, such a measurement would be invalid.”

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