At Lucas Industries, Springfield, Vermont, a highly specialised producer of tooling and fixtures for the aircraft industry, two portable inspection arms from ROMER CimCore both fitted with Delcam’s  PowerINSPECT software have become an integral part of the production process.

Some of the Lucas’s lay-up tools, such as those for fabricating leading edges of airliner wings and tail fins, may span twelve feet or more. Lucas also makes a few high-production steel tools for stamped and formed parts, and occasionally does things for local engineers and inventors. It even fabricates wooden tools for very early stage try-outs. Jobs range from commercial airliners and helicopters to military aircraft. Customers include Boeing, Sikorsky, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and a host of their suppliers. Lucas also produces tooling for the automotive and boating industries.

Nearly everything Lucas builds is one-off, a tool or fixture design never seen before and unlikely to ever be seen again. At best, said Gary Westfall, Vice President and Chief Designer, the company might get a “string” of tools or fixtures representing several key production stages in the customers’ factories. Even in these cases, each tool is a little different; the only thing they have in common is the underlying CAD geometry.

"Basically, the (Romer) CMMs are at the heart of the business here."

Lucas uses the Delcam software and the ROMER CimCore arms to certify that the tools it makes conform to the computer models from which they are generated. “Special emphasis is given to surface contours, scribe lines that mark the perimeters of parts, and tool location holes, especially bushings,” Mr. Westfall said.

The inspection processes at Lucas must stay synchronized with production. “Dimensional accuracy and repeatability are important, of course,” Mr. Westfall observed. “But equally important for us are speed in set-up, and fast and easy operation. We also need the ability to handle engineering data such as CATIA and IGES files, to manipulate the geometric data, to do the statistical analysis and to generate reports,” he added. “PowerINSPECT and the new ROMER CimCore arm give us all of this. Basically, the CMMs are at the heart of the business here.”

The company even does some reverse engineering with the arms. “We take a few dozen points with the probe, run them through PowerINSPECT, and generate a new computer model,” he said. “Dimensionally, the result is very close to the original, no more than a few thousandths off at any point.”

“When we got the first inspection arm we had to sell the customers on using it, instead of the gantry CMMs they were familiar with,” Mr. Westfall recalled. “With PowerINSPECT, we made believers out of them very quickly.”