RA Labone & Co Ltd. is a well-established manufacturing company that specialises in producing precision plastic injection mouldings, insert mouldings, metal pressings, and a variation of assemblies. With a rich history spanning over 50 years, RA Labone has built a reputation for delivering high-quality products to discerning blue-chip customers worldwide.
To ensure the quality of their products and keep up with their growing output of production, RA Labone’s inspection department needed an efficient measuring solution.
After careful consideration, they decided to purchase the SmartScope CNC 500 from OGP UK.
Project Brief:
RA Labone invested in state-of-the-art injection moulding machines, robot loading systems, and specialised fixtures to support high-volume production of intricate and precise mouldings.
However, this increase in production capacity posed a challenge for the company’s inspection department. Traditional inspection methods, designed for low to medium-volume metal components, proved inadequate in terms of efficiency and accuracy.
To ensure the quality and precision of their manufactured components, RA Labone needed an accurate and high-speed measuring system that could handle the demands of their high-volume production. They conducted practical demonstrations of several non-contact measuring machines to find the most effective solution.
The Solution:
“Having witnessed other measuring systems in action, a demonstration performed by OGP UK’s staff proved that the company’s SmartScope CNC 500 was able to detect things that the other products we saw could not pick-up,” explained Bryan Brownlow, RA Labone Quality Technician.
“The accuracy, speed and ease of use of the OGP UK system meant that it outperformed the other systems,” said Bryan.
After careful consideration, RA Labone determined that the SmartScope CNC 500 from OGP UK was the ideal solution to address their measurement challenges.
The SmartScope CNC 500 offers swift CNC capabilities and exceptional performance within a bridge-design system with ample travel capacity. In this setup, the parts are transported along a Y-axis stage driven by a precise DC motor, while the optics assembly moves across an enduring bridge cross member along the X-axis. This configuration guarantees swift and seamless part movement, ensuring reliable and robust measurement accuracy.
“Given the demanding nature of the industrial sectors we serve, the SmartScope CNC 500’s excellent reporting function has been a major benefit,” said Bryan.
The Benefits:
The OGP UK SmartScope CNC 500 ensures consistent measurement accuracy, using its multisensory technology (touch probes, laser scanners and micro-probes).
“The OGP UK machine combines a Touch Probe & Optical measuring systems in a single fully programmable unit,” said Bryan.
“The excellent training received from OGP UK, combined with the system’s ease of use, meant that our quality personnel soon mastered the machine’s controls.
“As we were quickly able to write, store and recall specific part programs, then load multiple parts onto the machine, the SmartScope CNC 500 was performing high-accuracy measuring routines on complex, high volume injection mouldings. Its ability to measure multiple features on a number of samples in one set-up has provided significant programming and cycle time savings.”
By integrating the OGP UK CNC 500 into their manufacturing processes, RA Labone ensures uninterrupted production, swift speeds, and efficient management of their high volume of orders.
“Given the sheer magnitude of our output and the challenging accuracy specifications of our injection moulded parts, we were delighted to find a technology that had the speed to precisely measure our multiple parts in a fast, automatic CNC mode,” said Bryan.
“The fact that we are able to make fast, precise measurements on the most complex of parts means that we are able to provide almost instant dimensional feed-back to production ensures the continued quality of our output.”
Why OGP UK?
The integration of OGP UK’s SmartScope CNC 500 into RA Labone’s manufacturing processes has enabled efficient management and quality control, ensuring the high volumes of components they produce are top quality.
“Our OGP UK measuring system has proven very successful, helping to accommodate the output of further high-volume additions to our manufacturing plant.” [Bryan]
