Donnelly Custom Manufacturing Company, a leader in short-run injection molding, has invested in a 3D laser scanner to provide advanced inspection services, continuing its relentless quest to improve quality, precision and turnaround services for customers.
By purchasing a Laser Design Surveyor DS-2020, Donnelly has enhanced its in-house inspection capability, allowing customers to consolidate suppliers through the elimination of third-party inspection contractors. The new machine also helps reduce production time and enables employees to start focusing faster on design and molding issues.
Donnelly has seen immediate demand for the service, as customers are increasingly seeking precise inspection services to help them ensure quality in meeting today’s demands for products with specific surface profiles and complex shapes.
“At Donnelly, we’re always searching for and investing in ways to improve quality and speed to make sure our customers are receiving parts on time and without defect,” says Ron Kirscht, president of Donnelly. “This laser scanner is another step in our best-practices quality assurance process, and we look forward to helping our customers solve ever more complex problems.”
The process begins with a CNC rotary table that helps orient the part for inspection. Then the 3D laser scanner goes over the entire part and takes coordinated measurements. Software (Geomagic Qualify, in Donnelly’s case) interprets the information and creates a 3D point cloud to compare against the customer’s part model file and engineering drawings. This helps ensure parts are molded correctly the first time, reducing the occurrence of defective products.
Inspection houses are aggressively marketing 3D laser scanning services, but Donnelly’s customers can now benefit from the service without using another outside supplier. Advantages include faster delivery of inspection reports; the opportunity to apply precise data about manufactured parts to improve the process; the ability to detect mold wear issues over time; and much more.
Laser scanning also helps the company reconcile problems between design and processing and get parts back up and running faster. This troubleshooting ability can significant time and uncertainty out of a process by quickly identifying and fixing problems or dimensional/part inaccuracies.