Thread: A walk through the shop…

Actually, a quick walk through the machine shop… just for SG..

As you walk through the doors of our manufacturing facility, the first area you enter is actually our assembly area. Here, there are rolling carts with finished assemblies:

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Stationary shelving with assemblies to undergo final inspection:

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And even bodies that still have the QC tags attached. Each plane body has a checklist that travels with it through each of our manufacturing processes:

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We use a lot of carpeting and cardboard to keep parts separate:

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It’s often the wooden parts that get put on last in this area:

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Stepping out of the assembly area (and putting on our safety glasses!) we head into the surface grinding area. Here you can see various bodies with QC sheets:

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…as well as some unique bodies being ground..

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It’s also in this area where we have some of our largest mills – each holding up to 60 different tools, and capable of some pretty complex operations. Here’s a “tombstone” with plane bodies mounted at all sorts of weird angles for some reason….

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Each face of the tombstone can hold multiple fixtures, or pieces of tooling. While not necessarily much to look at – these are executed in very hard steels, at high tolerances, and are the foundations for accurate and repeatable milling:

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Mounting a part in different orientations lets us use one milled surface as the reference face for a subsequent operation – as well as positioning the casting so as to allow for machining operation on a different axis:

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Of course, each step in the mill is choreographed, and can be easily seen by numbering the steps (and the tool used) on a casting…

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At the very back of the building is where the real high-tech equipment is..
Here’s an automatic lathe turning out some sort of specialized part:

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And, on a nearby desk, there are a few more! What’s interesting here – is that the “green tag” part can be seen! It’s the first part made in the run – 100% in tolerance and fully inspected by our QC department…

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Here are a few other boxes of parts, with one shown after milling, and the first off’s lying nearby…

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Darn – just noticed we spelled “traveler” incorrectly on that control form:

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Another box of odds and end lying next to a small mill…

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Back into the QC shop, we can see that the part being evaluated here is obviously being used for setup only…as it’s not painted. Why waste the additional cost painting a casting that being used to setup production.

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And there are sure a lot of tolerances to check on some parts! A quick glance at the drawing shows lots of point of interest. Tacked up the wall by the CMM (a three dimensional measurement machine) there appears to be a drawing being used to set up inspection procedures…

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Of course, QC is also checked at almost ever stage of assembly too:

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What really kind of neat is seeing all of the parts come together at once. All of the shots in this post were taken over a period of about 40 minutes…. It not often that there are so many parts running through the machine shop all at once. You should be able to recognize many of them in the pictures of some finished planes below…

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Cheers –

Rob
(remember - ya saw 'em here first!)