The Dudley, UK factory of The Timken Company supplies the engineered bearings it manufactures into a multitude of industries including mining, food and beverage, pulp and paper, cement, marine and waste water.
In May 2021, to enable the company to inspect these larger bearings, it purchased an AlteraM 15.12.10 ceramic bridge coordinate measuring machine (CMM) with axis travels of 1,500 x 1,200 x 1,000 mm manufactured by LK Metrology, Castle Donington. Assisting further in Timken’s quality control department is a Mitutoyo CMM capable of measuring ball and roller bearings with bores up to 800 mm in diameter. This machine was upgraded at the same time by LK with a new controller and identical CAMIO 2021 software for measurement, programming, analysis and reporting so that inspectors are able to swap programs conveniently between both machines.
William Hayes, Quality Improvement Engineer at the Dudley factory commented, “We selected LK Metrology to provide the new inspection facility, as it was the only potential supplier to offer us a new, well-priced, high accuracy machine of the right capacity. The company was also proactive in offering to retrofit new control software to our Mitutoyo BN710 CMM, as we need two measuring machines to cope with our increasing production throughput.
“Another point in LK’s favour was that its CMMs are installed in Timken plants in other parts of the world, including in the US, so the supplier was not an unknown quantity. It would in theory be possible to exchange programs internationally, but in practice this is unlikely to happen as most of our other sites are mass production environments, whereas we specialise in producing small quantities of engineered bearings below 10-off.”
