Based in Mansfield, Texas, Trinity Forge is a modern, closed-die forging plant that specializes in complex shapes in a wide variety of sizes to meet the most stringent customer specifications. Trinity’s commitment to quality requires them to not only stay on top of customers’ needs, but to stay ahead of them. That’s why Trinity Forge was the first closed-die commercial forge in the United States to receive ISO 9000 certification and why they continue to invest in the latest forging and machining technologies and quality controls.
As might be imagined with a forging company, Trinity Forge must inspect very large dies – often weighing from 500 to 4000 pounds. To inspect such large and cumbersome dies, the typical practice was to pour a plaster cast and then measure that cast on a fixed CMM. The difficulty with this method was that the inspections were of the cast impressions and not of the actual die faces. Trinity wanted to improve their inspection process to include scans of the entire die face, the actual die face and not just the impressions. Gaining this scanning capability would give them the ability to track critical die wear features, learn from the die wear, fix potential problems before they became actual problems, and engineer tooling changes to alleviate wear.
After surveying potential solutions, Trinity Forge decided to use the FARO Laser ScanArm® with Geomagic® Studio/Qualify 12 software. This hardware/software combination gives Trinity the total solution they were looking for to upgrade their inspection process.
By implementing the FARO Laser ScanArm solution into their processes, Trinity Forge is now able to check dies in about half the time as they did before using older techniques. They don’t have to pour a plaster and wait for it to cure. Scanning is very quick and, on average, it takes only one hour per die and thirty minutes of modeling time.
“The speed at which we can operate is a great value to us,” said Sheppard. “Several new dies from the CNCs can be scanned in the morning and approved in the afternoon. Reverse engineering of parts, maintenance of parts, or die models are all a snap using FARO.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Share your success story or thoughts!