De-coating of Vehicle Brake Discs by Laser
Laser cleaning for car manufacturer
Summary
Quality control is essential in most industries and car manufacturers are closely monitored as their safety record is crucial to their brand value and quality control. A production error which led to paint running on to braking services led to one car manufacturing plant facing huge costs and a critical delay in their UK based production facility.
Challenge
- A major car manufacturer needed to re-coat 10,000 brake discs, leaving the braking surface paint-free.
- They originally used magnetic masks to cover the paint free areas and then applied the re-coating.
- On quality control of the resultant brake discs it was found that paint had run into the braking surfaces.
- This was totally unacceptable on brakes and the braking surfaces all needed to be checked and then de-coated.
- While the company searched for a cost effective solution an additional problem arose as a film of rust developed on some of the braking surfaces.Solutions available to the car manufacturer ranged from dipping the brake discs into paint removal chemicals (hardly ideal plus would not have dealt with the rust issue) to completely re-manufacturing the several thousand brake discs that had been effected (a huge cost both financially and in time).
Solution
- Tube Tech have developed the worlds fastest laser cleaning service – four times faster than any other laser system available in the world and have developed equipment to harness the power of the laser for various applications.
- Utilising their precision laser de-coating equipment, Tube Tech were able to load the brake discs onto an assembly line were the brake surfaces could be rotated on a rotating table.
- The Tube Tech laser de-coating system was setup to apply a precision beam in a single plane.
- The brake discs were then rotated around this single plane to de-coat the entire braking disc area.
- The precision of the laser de-coating system allowed for tolerances of 0.001m and cleaned paint runs as well as removing rust deposits.
- It was found that due to the speed of this process it was quicker to apply this to every brake disc rather than inspect each one to see if the paint had run.
Client comment
“Tube Tech provided an alternative solution to an otherwise costly de-coating method which would have caused major disruption to our production schedule”. Production manager.
Tube Tech comment
Mike Watson, Managing & Technical Director: “Laser cleaning is an ideal process for precision de-coating and in multiple batches is very cost effective”.
Clients can be contacted via Tube Tech for references.
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