CMM pair measures Aston Martin Vantage body shells

At Aston Martin's Gaydon factory, quality control over the new Vantage sports car launched last year includes measuring approximately 400 points inside and outside every body shell.

At Aston Martin's Gaydon factory, quality control over the new Vantage sports car launched last year includes measuring approximately 400 points inside and outside every body shell.

To perform the 100 per cent inspection, a pair of LK co-ordinate measuring machines (CMMs) has been integrated into the Vantage production line.

The process is in contrast to that used for the DB9 model, whereby sample body shells are inspected off-line in a room adjacent to the production area using two similar CMMs from LK, which was acquired by Metris in January 2006.

The Vantage body is based on Aston Martin's new VH architecture, which is manufactured entirely at Gaydon.

At the end of the line, the body moves into the measuring cell, where it is fixtured in 'car line' within the 6,000 x 3,000 x 2,500 mm working volume of the twin LK LY-90S CMMs.

A tracking system indentifies the vehicle type, ie whether it is a left- or right-hand drive coupe.

The appropriate program is then called up within the LK control software, CAMIO Studio 4.2, and simultaneous, mirror-image inspection cycles either side of the car are launched automatically.

Results are accurate to better than 10 microns over the length of the car.

Recorded points captured by the touch trigger probes are stored automatically on the server, which generates reports that include statistical process control (SPC) trend data on the body production process.

Such reports are prepared at smaller manufacturing customers using similar functionality within CAMIO itself.

At Aston Martin, metrology staff use this capability locally to display reports on-screen to assist day-to-day management of the inspection cell.

Of the 400 locations measured, about 10 per cent are key tooling points that define how the car is put together.

These points are extracted and subjected to SPC within CAMIO to provide direct feedback on the shop floor, providing an early warning if the vehicle body is drifting out of tolerance.

An additional feature of CAMIO is its ability to read Aston Martin's I-DEAS CAD files, via IGES, which are then used to create measuring programs off-line directly from the electronic models.

It is therefore a simple matter for alterations to be made to existing measuring programs to take account of design changes, or to prepare programs for inspecting future car models.

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