Quality Control in Automotive Seating Manufacturing

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader,

All sorts of effort goes into making sure that car seats are comfortable across their intended range of operation. You know why. An uncomfortable car seat makes driving over the river to grandmother's house miserable. Today’s Check it Out link takes you to a highly informative Web resource covering four key aspects of the automotive seat quality control process. It’s a pleasant ride.

Car seats are complicated assemblies of headrests, foam components, slides, frames and so forth. The seat can be fully reclined, angled, lowered, moved towards or away from the steering column, and it has to operate across its range of positions within the tight confines of a vehicle’s cab.

To ensure high quality, this means measuring seat positions – especially tight spaces – precisely and comparing the data to specifications. And that means you need close coordination between your measurement devices and your CAD, CAM and computer-aided measurement and 3D inspection software. Laser-based, non-contact portable coordinate measurement systems have emerged as the standard measurement method in the car seat quality control process. The “Quality Control in Automotive Seating Manufacturing” Web resource both explains and shows you why.

Produced by FARO Technologies, this Web resource explores a complete measurement system made up of the FARO Edge Arm, the FARO Laser Line Probe and FARO’s CAM2 Measure 10 computer-aided measurement and 3D inspection software. The slant is car seating, but it’s easy to extrapolate the data you’ll learn here to any measurement environment.

The site has two key components: videos and a downloadable PDF. The four narrated presentations cover seat surface measurement, hip point check, foam testing and lumbar support measurement. A brief paragraph describes the importance of each dimension under study. The beauty of each video is that in less than a minute, you can see the ease of use and power of 3D measurement for these jobs. Slick pieces of work.

The FARO Edge ScanArm portable CMM (coordinate measuring machine) and CAM2 Measure 10 computer-aided measurement and 3D inspection software provide a complete system for automotive seat measurement and any application requiring measuring, testing or scanning parts. Image courtesy of FARO Technologies Inc

However, the gold on this Web resource is the PDF. It takes you step-by-step through the workflows associated with each video. It’s loaded with close-up photos of the measurements being taken, and it has lots of screenshots of scanned geometry, scan-to-CAD comparison operations and the like. Full technical specifications on the FARO Edge ScanArm and FARO’s CAM2 Measure 10 software are provided.

The videos and PDF on the “Quality Control in Automotive Seating Manufacturing” Web resource are boffo performances. Hit today’s Check it Out link to see for yourself. Make sure to download the PDF. It’s simply terrific.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering