Inspection

Anchor Harvey has full inspection capabilities and quality control personnel to perform an in-house inspection of all finished parts. Inspection is an important part of the forging and material production process and includes different types of testing that determine the physical and chemical properties of a forged metal part.

Anchor Harvey provides full forging inspection and testing, especially for aerospace, automotive, and construction materials. These services are fast and reliable for destructive and non-destructive testing and are used to verify the materials, properties, composition, and to identify hidden flaws.

Destructive vs. Non-Destructive Testing

Inspection is a wide field, with hundreds of different types of testing methods that can determine any number of important chemical and physical properties. These can include something as simple as hitting the part to listen to its resonant sound, to a full penetrative scan using ultrasonic waves fed into a modeling program.

Inspection can be broken down into the following categories:

• Destructive testing includes all methods that destroy some percentage of the part or alter it in such a way that it cannot be included as part of the final product batch. Often, destructive testing is used in large production runs whereby any randomly chosen part is likely to represent the entire batch and losing one piece of the production run is not prohibitively expensive.

• Non-Destructive testing includes any methods that maintain the integrity of the final component and does not alter the part in such a way that it becomes unusable in the final batch. Non-destructive testing is important when a production run is small or very expensive to produce per part. It is especially important when a single large part is ordered, and the integrity of this single ordered piece is vital.

Methods of Testing

Anchor Harvey can provide a wide range of inspection processes. These are used to determine tensile strength, yield strength, and hardness to ensure final application performance.

The following is an exploration of some common inspection processes:

• Hardness Testing: Depending upon the hardness scale used (Brinell, Rockwell, Vickers, etc.), various loads are pressed against the part across a small ball or indenting tool for a determined amount of time. The part will deform around the indenting tool, and that distance of indentation is used to calculate the total hardness. This process is destructive in nature.

• Tensile Testing: Also called tension testing, tensile testing is a process that pulls on both ends of a finished part with immense but controlled force. The part will begin to stretch, deform, and perhaps eventually shatter or tear. The amount of time and amount of force used can be included in calculations to determine tensile strength, shattering points, and maximum elongation of the part. This is considered a destructive process.

• CMM: A Coordinate Measuring Machine is a large machine that prods the finished part with special tools called probes that can record their location in 3D space when contacting the surface of a part. A machine programming engineer can create an inspection program that prods the part in various critical locations to check critical dimensions. A CMM can include one or more probes that can simply check critical dimensions or can use enough probes and a complex mount to gather so many data points to visualize a simple model of the part.

• Penetrative Scanning: Commonly using ultrasonic or radiographic wave generators, a penetrative test maps the internal structure of the final part at varying levels of detail. These scans can identify obvious defects within the structure of the part and can be compared to other scans to ensure consistency in a batch or consistent quality from production run to production run.

Anchor Harvey’s Inspection Shop

Anchor Harvey provides the previously mentioned testing methods and provides extra inspection methods upon request, as we have a network of inspection shops with many more in-depth chemical and mechanical testing methods. Anchor Harvey guarantees the quality of all forged aluminum products, and the variety of in-house inspection methods is just one small part of our overall quality guarantee. Request a quote today.