Tight Tolerances, Laser Cutting, Polyester Backed Tape and the Aerospace Industry
Extremely tight tolerances.
That’s what one of Gasket Engineering’s aerospace customers needed for some polyester backed tape that was being cut for use on one of its military vehicles, this part was quite intricate for several different reasons.
- First, the project included 30 different shapes that need to be cut.
- Second, the parts included voids (or areas that needed to be masked off so that there would not be adhesive material in certain sections).
- Third, these pieces needed to be arranged together properly and sent to the manufacture in a certain configuration
As with all aerospace part construction, consistency, precision, and exact edges are required. Because of these tight tolerances needed, the customer was cutting these intricate pieces by hand. Each of the 30 pieces was cut using a razor blade and a cardboard template. This process insured precision but naturally took a great deal of time and care.
This aerospace customer was referred to Gasket Engineering because they are a 3M Preferred Converter. Gasket Engineering worked with the customer to transfer this intricate, Tier Two Boeing application project from a painstaking, time-consuming process to a streamlined, exact, repeatable process on Gasket Engineering’s state of the art laser cutting equipment. They were able to load the customers AutoCAD drawings of the part into one of their precision laser cutting machines and produce the polyester backed tape components with extremely clean edges in a fraction of the time that it used to take to do it manually. Tight tolerances every time! We asked 3M’s Jason Christopher about Gasket Engineering, and he had this to say: “Gasket Engineering has a broad range of excellent capabilities that not all of our 3M Preferred Converters has. They are highly creative and willing to do whatever it takes to do the job well. They are a partner who is continuously improving, adding the equipment necessary to exceed customer expectations.”
If you have a challenging component that has requirements for tight tolerances or would like help in figuring out how to streamline your production process, feel free to give one of Gasket Engineering’s sales engineers a call. You could also check out more about Gasket Engineering’s laser cutting capabilities here.
