GAMMA AEROSPACE
- Structural Success
Aerospace manufacturing company upgrades its
inspection capabilities with two new pieces
of equipment from KEYENCE
Gamma Aerospace LLC produces big parts:
stringers and struts, doors and access panels,
seat tracks, spars, and more, some longer than
a pickup truck. In fact, if it’s used to construct
a commercial airliner, helicopter, or military
aircraft, chances are good that it came from
Gamma.
But the Mansfield, Texas manufacturer makes plenty
of small parts as well—the brackets and fittings,
for example, that are needed to assemble larger
structural components into a functioning aircraft.
This product diversity was the problem facing
Gamma’s director of quality and operations, Jason
Jackson: how to measure the miniature, in a shop
geared towards the macro?
Terrific capabilities, tiny needs
“Our digital inspection area has an array of measuring
equipment including coordinate measuring machines
(CMMs) and portable inspection arms, but even
our smallest CMM has an 8-foot bed, and the arm
has a 6-foot inspection envelope,” he says. “These
are fine for our larger parts, but we also machine an
awful lot of small, tight-tolerance parts. We found
it time-consuming and a little awkward to setup a
humungous measuring machine for parts that you
can hold in your hand.”
One of these was a triangular, two-inch long metal
clip destined for Lockheed’s F-35 fighter jet, which
Gamma machines in quantities of 300 of parts
per month. Until recently, one of Jackson’s team
members would inspect a representative sample of
each production lot on one of the CMMs, but because
the parts would later be cadmium plated, it was
necessary to 100% inspect each of the part’s three
close-tolerance holes, verifying they would meet
post-plating tolerance requirements.
“The CMM part of the inspection process wasn’t
super long, maybe 10 minutes or so, but we had
to use an inside micrometer to check all the holes,”
Jackson explains. “Think about hand-checking three-
hundred parts times three holes each—that’s 900
holes per job. That’s what got me thinking about the
KEYENCE.”
4 WIRE NEWS September 2019