Rigibore® Inc / Case Studies / Marine / Marine
Case Studies
Our boring technology features in precision boring applications within a wide range of industries in the US and around the world - including for marine, automotive, aerospace and heavy plant operations
Marine
Rigibore® was contacted in a bid to reduce bottleneck scheduling issues between boring and honing operations inherent to production of a new 4-cylinder engine at a major manufacturer of marine engines for the leisure industry.
Previous boring operations had involved boring the cast-iron cylinder bores to 20µm below the target threshold and operating at ±10µm tolerance. Subsequent honing might therefore have to take up to 30µm into account at the extreme end of operations.
By improving the tolerance at which boring occurs to less than a few microns and building in a reduced safety margin, honing can now be achieved significantly faster than was previously the case. This means that the bottleneck between boring (a relatively quick operation) and honing (a rather more time-consuming operation) is much less of an issue.
The resultant enhanced consistency in respect of the cylinder bores allows the manufacturer to plan its production schedule much more effectively, since honing now can take into account a much smaller range of metal to machine at the extreme end of operations (much less than 30µm, as was the case previously).
Says Rigibore®’s Elwyn Buckingham, applications engineer: “in the boring world continually pushing the boundaries – narrowing the tolerances at which we can consistently operate – is vital to staying on top of the game.”
