“The 2009 Gear Expo was truly a success for Wenzel Geartec,” says Keith Mills, president of Xspect Solutions, Inc., the wholly owned subsidiary of Wenzel GmbH of Germany. “We sold over $2 million of new equipment and drew significant attention from the wind energy community with our new LH2600 Hybrid CMM that we showcased measuring a wind turbine gearbox gear.”
According to Mills, the hybrid machine was specifically developed to meet the demand of the wind energy gear manufacturing community where large internal and external gears and pinions require highly accurate measuring as well as traditional CMM measuring of prismatic parts. Traditional gear inspection machines are typically mechanical bearing devices with horizontal arms holding the scanning probe. To simply expand this type of machine design concept that was originally developed to measure 500mm diameter gears and apply it to 2500mm diameter gears doesn’t work. For that reason Wenzel has developed this new hybrid machine design that uses an all-granite, air bearing structure, with a bridge-type construction so the probe can provide a much higher level of dynamics and scanning performance with no mechanical bearing wear over time. In addition, the machine requires no special foundation. The Hybrid LHGT 2600 machine has a prismatic measuring volume of 1500mm x 2500mm x 1200mm with an imbedded hydrostatic rotary table flush-mounted inside an Impala black granite machine base. The table and fixture can measure and support gears up to 2600mm diameter and weighing up to 20,000lbs. A removable tailstock column can also be mounted on the base to measure and support pinion gear shafts up to 1900mm in length. The machine uses Renishaw SP80 scanning technology.
“We have currently sold three of these new LHGT 2600 hybrid machines,” Mills says, “one in Europe and now two here in the United States. We also sold a WGT 1500 and a WGT 350 Wenzel gear checker to a leading gear manufacturer here on the East Coast.”
Xspect Solutions is headquartered in Wixom, Michigan, and is the number-three supplier of CMMs and GMMs in the North American metrology market including new Wenzel CMMs and GMMs and is the world’s largest supplier of pre-owned CMM equipment. Xspect Solutions also supplies new Wenzel CMMs and GMMS with its OpenDMIS software to the North American markets. For more information contact Mills at (248) 295-4300, kmills@xspectsolutions.com, or [www.xspectsolutions.com].
