The heat is on

To satisfy ever increasing demands for its wide range of services, the Dudley, West Midlands based subcontractor has continuously expanded its facilities, invested in the best available heat treatment plant and increased its skilled workforce.

The company now operates 19 furnaces that provide the capacity to keep pace with customer demand. AHT has the ability to heat treat a wide variety of aluminium products, from sheetmetal to large sand castings, ranging in weight from just a few grams to over 2.5 tonnes.

The NADCAP, AS 9100 accredited business, has achieved preferred supplier status with many aerospace primes and enjoys long-term relationships with companies such as Rolls-Royce, BAE and Airbus. In addition, AHT has assisted many automotive tier one and sub-tier suppliers in their adoption of aluminium in areas such as the integration of lightweight engine and suspension components. The company also enjoys a strong presence within the challenging motorsport sector and works with teams such as Mercedes and McLaren.

To complement its heat-treatment processes, AHT offers services such as solvent degreasing and dye-penetrant flaw detection. Also, as unwanted distortions can occur in intricate aluminium products due to the rapid heat transfer from the quenching process, the company operates a setting department that removes distortion in the treated condition whilst products remain ductile. To help further increase AHT’s setting department precision capabilities and to speed-up the throughput of its important work, a Quantum E ScanArm was recently purchased from Faro UK.

Alloy Heat Treatment director Ian Perks explains: “Although AHT is committed to providing an efficient service to our clients and remaining commercially competitive, the quality of the services that we provide and the premium standard of the heat treated components we deliver to our customers, are of paramount importance to us.

“In addition to frequently investing in the best possible heat treatment plant, given the nature of our customers and the challenging technical demands they place on us, we also believe in regularly up-dating our important material testing and dimensional quality control equipment.

“Owing to the speed and precision a ScanArm type device could provide, for many years we have felt that such an advanced inspection aid had a part to play in our organisation. Therefore, as our workload grew, recently we finally committed to placing an order – and Faro was top of our shortlist.

“After considering several Faro models, due to its speed, ease of use and impressive accuracy specification, we chose the Quantum E ScanArm. Given that it will be used in a working environment, it helped our decision that it has an impressive IP rating and is resistant to the ingress of dust and fluids.”

In AHT’s setting department, Mr Perks reports that the Quantum E has considerably sped-up the process with the scans enabling precise corrections to be made to components with subsequent re-scanning confirming that components adhere to customer requirements. Also, as AHT’s setting fixtures are unable to detect the distortions that occur in some parts, through the use of the ScanArm the business can now guarantee that these parts will machine successfully.

The Quantum E FaroArm, as purchased by AHT represents an ideal portable solution for businesses that are looking for a cost-effective, user-friendly and efficient factory inspection system. It has been tested to withstand the harshest shop-floor environments and to provide the accurate and reliable measuring results that give manufacturers maximum confidence in their quality assurance processes.

When a Faro Laser Line Probe option is attached to a FaroArm, it becomes an efficient ScanArm, capable of delivering up to 600,000 metrology points per second. AHT specified a Quantum E fitted with a Prizm Colour Laser Line Probe – said to be the world’s only colour laser line probe designed for use with portable measurement arms. The combination delivers excellent levels of performance across all applications that require accurate colour point cloud data capture.

Quantum FaroArms are claimed by the manufacturer to be the first arms in the market that are certified against ISO 10360-12:2016 for articulated arms, setting a new industry performance bar, and ensuring maximum measurement consistency and reliability.

Given the size of AHT’s facility and the requirement to occasional perform measurement and scanning routines in remote areas, it helped that the Quantum E benefits from high degrees of portability and speed of set-up. In addition, the use of dual hot-swappable batteries support prolonged cable-free operation, enabling the device to be used for extended period without the need for external power.

The Quantum E’s new electronic design guarantees optimal wireless operation for scanning and probing, allowing gathered data to be transmitted via high-speed wireless methods across the entire manufacturing floor.

Faro www.faro.com

Alloy Heat Treatment www.alloyheat.co.uk