Intricate Tight Tolerance Machining for Medical Devices

In this video we review a customer story that required intricate, tight tolerance machining for a medical device.  

Below is The Transcribed Video:

I have a pretty good example in front of us today which is a very complex medical device. The customer came to us because they had challenges getting the level of quality that they were looking for.

What we did was first we worked with the customer to understand what was most critical to them. In this example they were very concerned about the fitment between the top unit and this moving door. They were also very concerned about the way the edges lined up and any gaping or to minimize gaping.

We evaluated to what extent these features could be managed through the molding process. We are controlling this seam between these two molds, we are also molding in these features within this part.

But, there were many features within this assembly that couldn't be managed solely through the mold and that required secondary machining. So what we do is we add features on the back of the form part in this case this are PVC blocks and then we use secondary machining to make sure that the faces of the blocks are in the right orientation to the form surface and then all of the whole centers lineup in order to manage the fit and lock the parts in place.

In this example, many features on this unit are within five or ten thousandths of the dimensional callouts on the engineering drawings. We did that through a really intricate CNC setup process, we evaluated the parts using 3D scanning as we set them up, and then throughout the production runs we monitored very closely specific critical quality dimensions. That really manages not only the first fit of the first unit, but all of the units there after.

This example has been a very good one in that we have successfully made these parts through a few production runs with very little variation among all these features that are critical to that customer and it's been really a resounding success, something we are quite excited about.