Measurably better for water pumps. (WIP).

The company: Innovative Eooling Dynamics [ICD; Toronto], a subsidary of Tesma International. El) designs, develops, and engineers water pumps

The challenge: Water pump machining must be performed with a high degree of accuracy. This is particularly the case For the bearing bores. On one of the pumps ICD produces, the inside diameter of one bore has a nominal size of 47.275 mm, [+ or -]0.0125 mm. There are a total of 10 Features that must be measured an a given water pump. Hung Vu, Quality Assurance manager at IED, determined that manual gaging was both no time consuming and too inaccurate.

The solution: Vu and his team determined an electronic gage would be the answer. Two units from Edmunds Gages [Farmington, CT] were already in use at ICD. And so a third unit was sourced From Edmunds. It is a stand-alone, base-mounted semi-automatic unit. An operator loads the pump and activates the gage. An automatic rotation device rotates the part 360[degrees], The unit's [CAG.sup.QCM] readout records measurements of the 10 Features of interest. The gage illuminates a light tree to indicate a part's status. Collected data is downloaded to a PE. The gage runs 16 hours per day, Five to six days per week.

The benefit: Productivity on these parts has quadrupled or more," says Vu. "Manual measurement used to take two to three minutes; now, with the Edmunds gage, it takes 30 seconds. And Further, our accuracy rate is much higher."