An ad hoc team of management, assembly and mechanical engineering personnel at Promess are producing PPE for local hospitals, first responders, dentists, traveling nurses, homeless shelters and nursing homes in Southeastern Michigan.

Imagine a disc-shaped part, such as a bicycle wheel, with a weight taped to the rim. When the bike is lifted off the ground, the wheel will rotate and come to rest with the weight at the bottom.

Assembling one part to another usually requires a third material, screws, rivets, adhesive or filler metal, but it doesn't have to. In fact, sometimes all you have to do is bend, fold or deform a feature on one part to capture the other.

A press fit is an assembly in which one part is inserted tightly into a hole in another part. The inserted part is typically 0.001 to 0.002 inch larger than the mating hole. The assembly stays in place through friction and the force of the two parts pushing against each other.

Hydraulic presses cost less than servo presses, right? Wrong. The up front price of a servo press is almost always higher than that of a hydraulic press, but the benefits of a servo press more than make up for the difference.

As manufacturing moves further into the twenty-first century, more and more companies are turning to in-process testing to verify the functionality of their assemblies.

The customer required precision force and distance control along with sophisticated analysis to assemble valve seats and valve guides to precise tolerances and give their customer data to prove it.

The customer needed to thread two sub-assemblies together and torque to a specific value. The old way of making this part was to spin some electric torque-driver tools, while actuating them to the part with air cylinders.

Customer was looking for a turnkey assembly cell that had flexibility, data storage and management, but more importantly, a system that could provide accuracy to the battery manufacturing process.

Our customer is manufacturing a new recreational gearbox and has an existing line with aging monitoring and control equipment to verify proper backlash.