Part of the RENK group, Horstman is a manufacturer and global supplier of suspension systems for heavily armoured and tracked vehicles. It also produces safety-critical engineering components allied to its core products for the sub-sea and aerospace industries. A transatlantic investment has seen the company advance its quality control procedures significantly by installing identical new coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) at its factories in Bath, UK and Sterling Heights, USA. Built by LK Metrology in Donington, UK, the new CMMs were supplied with the world’s most compact and versatile tactile scanning probe technology to capture data on the size and shape of components more accurately and much faster than was possible previously using touch trigger probing alone.
The factory at the company’s headquarters in Bath, which dates back to the 1920s when the original suspension bogie for military vehicles was developed, was an early adopter of CMMs in the 1960s when LK was one of the first to pioneer the measuring technology. Horstman has had a succession of different CMM models over the years, most recently three machines of small, medium and large capacity from a different supplier. The new LK Altera M 25.15.12 bridge CMM, which has a large inspection volume of nominally 2.5 x 1.5 x 1.2 metres and is equipped with traditional touch trigger probing and an advanced tactile scanning probe, replaced the smallest of the three earlier machines.
Trevor Prynne, Business Development Director at Horstman commented, “The contact scanning capability of the new LK CMMs acquires many hundreds of surface points every second, enabling interrogation of form as well as size and position, including of bores 400 mm deep.
