Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 10

WILLIAM SHAMBLEY President NEW ENGLAND FOUNDRY TECHNOLOGIES • First article inspection • Pre-assembly QC checks of complicated molds / cores • Wear inspection of tooling, and in plant equipment and facilities inspections • Setup check: go-no-go testing • Defect quantification and feedback to simulation studies; can – adjust, retool, recast Improvements in processing time, automation of scans and inspection reporting, software assistance in reverse engineering (reduction in labor & experience required) are growing daily. Technologies like IBM’s Watson allow AI technologies and block- chain decision making to be fed scripted routines. Cloud processing can now be bought “ala cart” from IBM, AWS, and others. Many WHERE ARE SMART TECHNOLOGIES, IOT, AND 3D SCANNING GOING? Well, I call “BS” (to use foundry parlance) on that. Big foundries, have been able to do the following with 3D scanning – but job shops are mostly limited by their staff and creativity in using these applications – not their budgets. All of the following routine tasks are being performed in foundries – today. These tasks are relatively inexpensive to implement, and many can be outsourced – today. • Pattern inspection (archiving, acceptance of new patterns, validation of quality, etc) • Reverse engineering (patterns, ores, castings) • Extracting a casting digitally from old tooling • Scan to CAD Visualization and inspection / CMM / Part inspection for QC / reporting T here are many applications for 3D Scanning, with articles in Modern Casting, MCDP, and Elsevier that document decade of evolution to the current state of technology. So while some foundries have fully embraced scanning as a tool - overwhelmingly, I get comments that echo the sentiments of, “we’re just a job shop, we can’t justify…..” EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES HOW TO