Manufacturing Tip: Improve Aerospace Tooling - Part 1 of 4

Building aircraft has always been a struggle between the size of their components and the need to craft them carefully. More than any other device, airplanes epitomize the concept that “the devil is in the details” because in small errors lies the potential for great mischief such as increased drag and decreased range. So how do you maintain high precision while measuring something so large?

In the past, large structures such as wings, fuselages, or vertical stabilizers were difficult to make alike because there was no good way to measure them. The traditional measuring standard for objects over 20 feet was the theodolite. Although theodolite measurements can be fairly precise, they are subject to interpretation and as such are not always reproducible.

Luckily, the advent of the laser tracker has finally made precise, rapid, reproducible measuring over great distances a reality. Capable of gathering hundreds of points in hours, not days, laser trackers have quickly become the new portal to aircraft design, modeling, tool making, manufacturing, and quality checking, worldwide – threatening to obsolete the older theodolite method.

Operation of a laser tracker is simple. The tracker mounts on a tripod and emits a laser that is reflected off a target positioned at the point to be measured. As the operator moves the target from point to point and the light is reflected back to the tracker, the distance to each point is calculated.

Today the focus on tooling is even greater than for any previous generation of aircraft, for both metal and composite parts. No other instrument enables aircraft builders the ability to “get their arms around” the entire manufacturing process – from design to final dimensional checking. Due to its enormous range, precision, speed, and communication capability, the laser tracker gives aerospace manufacturers the ability to be more cost competitive by shifting the whole process of design and development into the virtual realm.

Read more about Laser Trackers
Download the Aerospace Tooling White Paper