industries

Tooling, Mold, and Die Metrology Equipment

Metrology systems and solutions can provide tremendous value for your company in the tooling, mold, and die manufacturing industry. As you work to produce high-quality tools, molds, and dies, implementing the right metrology processes and equipment can optimize your quality, efficiency, and capabilities.

Overview of Metrology

Metrology is the science of measurement. It involves using precise measurement tools and techniques to analyze dimensional, geometric, and other physical characteristics of objects, parts, and products.

In manufacturing, metrology is a critical part of your quality assurance and process control. By taking precise measurements, metrology provides valuable data that you can use to monitor variability and correct deviations from product specifications. This helps ensure that your end products meet required tolerances and stringent quality standards.

Metrology equipment includes instruments like coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), optical comparators, vision systems, laser trackers and scanners, and more. Your metrology labs may also utilize specialized software for analyzing measurement data.

Key Benefits of Metrology

Implementing metrology solutions provides many advantages for your company’s tooling, mold, and die production:

Improved quality control

Metrology gives you the measurement data needed to actively monitor your production quality. This allows you to catch errors early, before defective molds, dies, or tools are put into use. By inspecting parts during all stages of the production process, metrology helps your tooling company deliver exceptionally consistent, high-quality products to your own customers.

Better process control

The insights gained from metrology data allow you to spot inconsistencies and tweak processes before small issues turn into large problems. This prevents waste and inefficiency. Metrology enables a data-driven approach to incrementally improving your fabrication and machining processes.

Faster throughput

Metrology helps your tooling facilities streamline production workflows. Taking an optimized approach to quality control inspections, rather than inspecting every part, can speed up your processes without sacrificing quality. This increased efficiency enables higher manufacturing throughput for your company.

Design and engineering support

Metrology provides critical data that your tooling engineers can use to refine designs, improve simulation models, and optimize tool performance. By linking measurements to CAD models, metrology enhances your capabilities in design analysis, prototyping, and troubleshooting.

Documentation for traceability

Metrology provides documentation that demonstrates your company’s commitment to quality. Detailed measurement data for individual molds, dies, and tools provides traceability over their full lifecycle. This supports your defect analysis, failure investigations, preventative maintenance, and more.

Reverse engineering abilities

Metrology measurement data allows you to reverse engineer existing tools, molds, and dies. This facilitates replacement part fabrication, revisions of legacy hardware, and other applications for your business. It also aids in creating 3D models from your physical parts.

Streamlined product development

The insights gained from metrology allow for more efficient design analysis, prototyping, and new product introduction processes. This accelerates the development of innovative new tooling solutions for your company.

Metrology Applications for Tooling, Mold, and Die Production

Metrology has widespread applications throughout your tooling, mold, and die production workflow. Here are some examples:

Incoming inspection of raw cast iron blocks, aluminum plates, steel bars and other stock materials to verify quality before CNC machining into cores, cavities and other finished components. This prevents wasted time and cost from fabricating with faulty materials.
Laying out precise datum reference points on stock blanks to orient CMM probes, establish part zero positions for CNC mills and wire EDMs, and aid in workholding setups. Accurate datums are essential for machining accuracy.
Thoroughly measuring and analyzing dimensions, geometries, draft angles, radii, hole positions, surface finishes and other attributes on initial mold and die samples such as the first off tools. This confirms that your machining processes are executing correctly before committing to full production runs and prevents potential scrap losses.
Periodically measuring sections, inserts, cavities and other components at different stages during the machining process. This allows your team to identify and correct any emerging deviations from specifications early on before final heat treatment and assembly.
Final verification checks before shipment or mold trials that finished tools meet all your customer’s drawing requirements for dimensions, geometries, tolerances, surface finish specs, and other critical attributes. Complete inspection provides quality assurance and protects your reputation.
Analyzing dimensions and surface finishes on molded sample parts during mold tryouts and initial debugging. Comparing datasets confirms tools are producing compliant components before ramping up to full rate production.
Tracking tool wear, distortion trends, and dimensional changes during high volume production runs. Metrology reveals optimal windows for maintenance, when to schedule replacements, and maximizes your tooling productivity over full lifecycles.
Matching the performance of multiple versions of duplicated molds and dies by comparing metrology datasets. This allows balancing workloads across parallel production lines or cells to optimize overall throughput.
Concrete validation through measurement that revisions, texture modifications, material upgrades and other engineering changes achieve their intended purposes and deliver real performance improvements.
Identifying root causes when fabrication processes experience issues by comparing metrology data captured before and after breakdown events. The insights aid your investigation and corrective actions.
Monitoring decreasing measurement accuracy and new anomalies appearing over a tool’s usage lifetime. This data predicts optimal timing for preventative maintenance before failures cause unplanned downtime.
Detailed forensic wear pattern analysis when tools unexpectedly fail or break. Metrology mapping provides insights into damage modes, service loads, and other factors that caused premature tooling failures.
Reverse engineering obsolete and worn out legacy tooling by using laser scanner metrology systems to rapidly capture high resolution 3D point clouds of existing parts. This enables replacement fabrication.
Data-driven design optimization relies on objective metrology insights. Measurements reveal where improving drafts, tightening tolerances, removing unnecessary stock and other changes can enhance performance, durability and manufacturing efficiency.

Metrology is Essential for Tooling, Mold, and Die Manufacturers

Implementing a robust metrology program delivers significant advantages for your tooling, mold, and die production operations. The measurement data and insights provided by precision metrology systems allow your company to:

Optimize processes to reduce waste, speed up production, and boost quality
Perform proper quality control to meet your customer requirements and specifications
Support engineering tasks like design analysis, simulation model refinement, and new product introduction
Conduct root cause analysis and corrective action when production problems occur
Maximize productivity over the full lifecycle of your molds, dies, and production tooling

With the right metrology solutions in place, you gain the objective data needed to actively refine and improve all aspects of your fabrication workflows. Metrology provides the feedback loop for enabling quality, efficiency gains, and driving innovations in your tool performance. For these reasons, metrology is an indispensable enabler for successful tooling, mold, and die production in today’s highly competitive manufacturing marketplace.

FAQs About Metrology for Tooling, Mold, and Die Manufacturing

Q: How can metrology aid in optimizing my machining and EDM processes?

A: By measuring machined parts at different production stages, metrology provides data about process variability. This allows dialing in optimal feeds, speeds, stepovers, and other parameters to minimize your tool wear, prevent tool breakage, and maximize material removal rates. Metrology verifies that your CNC programs accurately execute the CAD model.

Q: What metrology solutions can help me speed up my inspection workflows?

A: Multi-sensor CMMs with touch probes, laser scanners, and vision capabilities can conduct fully automated inspection routines faster than manual techniques. This avoids bottlenecks at your incoming materials, first article, and final inspection stages.

Q: How does metrology data help my engineering team refine part designs?

A: Metrology reveals potential design improvements by showing where extra stock allowance was unnecessary or where tolerance ranges could be tightened to prevent your wasted time and materials. This metric-driven data aids optimization.

Q: Can metrology support my preventative maintenance and tool life management efforts?

A: Yes. Metrology provides concrete data about your tool wear patterns, revealing when superficial damage begins accumulating into a critical failure risk. This predicts optimal windows for your maintenance and tool replacements.

Q: What metrology solutions support reverse engineering my legacy and obsolete tooling inventory?

A: Laser scanner-equipped metrology systems can rapidly capture millions of data points to map your existing tooling in high resolution. This creates complete 3D point clouds to enable replacement fabrication.

Q: How can metrology help me prove out revisions and upgrades to my tooling designs?

A: When changes are made, metrology provides the hard evidence that revisions like polishing out textures or upgrading to a new material actually achieve their intended purpose and deliver measurable improvements for your company.