To help win and maintain its Silver Supplier to AgustaWestland preferred supplier status,
One of the largest AgustaWestland projects supported by Tods Aerospace in recent years is the AW159 Lynx Wildcat. Tods has been involved in the co-design and manufacture of several, major component parts for the aircraft, including the cockpit doors, the cargo doors and many of the main fuselage panels, all of which are made from carbon composite.
“Three years ago we invested in a 5-axis CMS router so we could machine these components and other tooling in our own factory,” said Richard Winterbottom, operations director at Tods. “Around the same time we were also bidding for increasingly complex 5-axis work. Our strategy is to bring more and more manufacturing capability in-house, so we can be more agile and keep better control of lead times and quality. This is particularly important during the early phases of new product introduction.”
A year later the company employed CNC manager Bob Young, initially as CNC programmer. “Prior to that, we were only using the machine's basic capabilities,” stated Winterbottom. Bob Young had been with the company a year when manufacturing put together a proposal for a Renishaw RMP600 wireless touch probe and OMV Pro software.”
The RMP600 is a compact touch probe which incorporates Renishaw's patented RENGAGE high accuracy strain gauge technology and uses proven frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) radio signal transmission. It offers all the usual benefits of Renishaw touch probes, including the ability to measure complex 3D part geometries on all sizes of machining centres.
“One of the key reasons for purchasing the probe was to align the AW159 cabin roof and then machine it,' said Young. “This has proven very successful and we are now producing our own CMM reports generated from the use of the Renishaw OMV software and the RMP600 probe. Without the probe we would not have been able to machine the roof as accurately and we couldn't have aligned the jigs with such precision.
“We also use the Renishaw probe for first article inspection (FAI) on every new civil aircraft flooring project. For example, we currently have a project where a batch of machined components needs to go back on the CMS router, as the customer has made a modification. We'll use the probe to re-align the component prior to machining the additional feature.”
Young also claims that the RMP600 allows the company to take on more complex work and produce parts at the required high quality, faster than ever before. “We still feel that we're in the early stages of getting to know the probe's capabilities,” he said, “but we are very happy with the accuracy and, in particular, the consequent reduction in scrap parts further down the production line. These are large, expensive components and we can use the probe to identify and avoid errors while we are still at the R&D stage.”
The accuracy gains attributable to the RMP600 touch probe are echoed by Tods' quality director Martyn Perks, who stated: “Digital manufacture and digital design has given different sorts of tolerances and different features which using traditional measuring equipment such as micrometers and vernier calipers doesn't really get us to the levels of quality and accuracy and checking that we require.”
To get the most from any new technology, those who are charged with operating it must know exactly what it's capable of. Both Young and Winterbottom agree that the reason Tods Aerospace invested in the Renishaw equipment owed a great deal to the level of support from the British company.
“The Renishaw team has been fantastic,' concluded Young, “especially with regards set-up and training. Their engineers spent hours with us, making sure we knew what we were doing. We looked at other suppliers, but we weren't convinced they could support us as well as Renishaw could.”
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