With more than 40 years’ experience, Coker Engineering is one of the largest engineering companies in the South West of England.
Providing precision sub-contract manufacturing services to a wide range of industries, Coker Engineering operates 30 CNC machines from its purpose-built facility in Taunton.
Working with demanding industries such as aerospace, defence, medical, nuclear, rail, oil and gas and more, Coker Engineering demand quality at every stage of the manufacturing cycle and invested in VICIVISION turned part measurement to help them achieve that.
Project Brief:
Coker Engineering produce more than 250,000 parts per month, with a big emphasis on not only producing quality parts but being able to deliver them quickly to customers.
A key challenge that Coker faced was in the quality department, with manual methods of inspection causing a bottleneck in production and first-off and in-process checks taking time due to the manual nature of the Talyrond inspection devices they were using.
Coker Engineering were looking to improve their inspection processes, to deliver greater speed, accuracy and reliability of their inspection.
One particular part being manufactured in large quantities, piston pins for Triumph motorcycles, required geometric measurements to check key features.
Giles Throup, Managing Director at Coker Engineering, said: “There was one particular application that drove the need to improve on our existing process, which was the geometric inspection of piston pins, predominantly to interrogate, validate and inspect those geometric requirements.
“We were relying on Talyrond conventional, contact, roundness checking machines. Part of the problem that we had was the manual centring and levelling.
“The accuracy of the result, particularly with regards to the cylindricity, is only as good as the centring and levelling. Even the most experienced engineers would get multiple decimal places of variation from one measurement to the next on the same part. When you’re trying to work to one or two-micron tolerances, that’s not acceptable.
“We were spending just as much time measuring parts as we were making parts and, as the volume grew and grew, it just wasn’t viable. We needed a faster solution.”
The Solution:
Coker Engineering invested in the VICIVISION Techno M309 machine to alleviate their inspection bottleneck and reliably deliver high-quality inspection reports for their customers.
After a tendering process, an on-site demonstration of the M309 convinced Coker Engineering that the VICIVISION was the perfect machine for their requirements, not only to measure the piston pins but to measure a large majority of other components they manufacture as well.
“The number one driving factor behind the investment was its accuracy and repeatability,” Giles said. “The M309 was the machine that was demonstrated to us here on site and it was the results that demonstrated that that piece of kit was on par, if not better, than our Talyrond in terms of accurately and repeatably producing roundness and cylindricity results to the accuracy that we needed.”
The Benefits:
The VICIVISION has transformed the way Coker Engineering are able to check the quality of their parts straight from the shopfloor and has delivered a return on investment within its first year.
Operators are now able to take their first-off components straight from the CNC machine to the VICIVISION and inspect parts within seconds, reducing machine down-time, improving productivity and reducing lead times for their customers.
Giles said: “If anything, it’s actually allowed us to up our inspection frequency, which has further improved our control because it’s just such a quick measurement.
“It is heavily used for first-off qualification and it’s reduced the need for secondary validation. All of the results that are recorded on the VICIVISION are nigh on infallible and the reports are all automatically saved and catalogued, so at the click of a mouse, anybody can access those records.
“The amount of time that we’ve saved on inspection throughput is hundreds of man hours per year. Not only has that saved us time in the inspection process itself, a massive chunk of that time goes straight back into productivity and production output. So, it’s really a double whammy in terms of the saving that it has generated for us.”
He added: “More than half of our turned parts that fit within the M309 envelope now go through the VICIVISION machine.
“In fact, we are at a point at which it is that heavily trafficked, I suspect it won’t be very long before we’re talking about buying another one.”
The benefits to the production process are clear but the financial benefits are also evident with the return on investment delivered ahead of schedule to provide great value to Coker Engineering.
Jayzee Boyne, Finance Director, said: “We can say with confidence that the VICIVISION has delivered in terms of our return on investment.
“For those hesitant about making investment in a similar piece of equipment, in our experience we would recommend it. It increases productivity, it increases customers’ confidence in terms of quality parts that you’re delivering and it increases the output for the business, which can only be good for the bottom line.
“When we were initially looking at the return on investment, we were forecasting it should pay for itself within two years. We’re coming up to a year after investment on the VICIVISION and it has already paid for itself.
“In terms of the cost and the output that we were expecting, and even in terms of the training required and setup required to get it up and running in the business, we could hit the ground running with it.”
Why VICIVISION UK?
VICIVISION UK is a specialist in providing high-performance, non-contact measurement systems for turned parts and cylindrical components.
VICIVISION UK is part of the Carfulan Group which specialises in providing the most advanced manufacturing technologies available, helping customers across its five divisions to achieve optimal performance and end-product excellence.
Giles said: “We would wholeheartedly recommend the VICIVISION product to anybody inspecting shafts. The time saving for us has been a real evolution in our process for high-precision cylindrical parts, right the way through to the ongoing service, maintenance and calibration.
“We cannot fault anything that we’ve had from the VICIVISION team and the broader Carfulan Group as a whole.”
