Tubeworx is a quality conscious company based in the Brisbane suburb of Clontarf specialising in CNC mandrel tube bending and automotive tube and hoses.

Owners Mick and Sonya Horsburgh decided that the business needed a faster and more accurate means to both reverse engineer and inspect their manufactured tubes. To this end they approached a number of portable arm suppliers and following an exhaustive process in May this year decided on the ROMER Tube Inspection Arm.

The ROMER Tube Inspection Arm with DOCS software is a complete tube inspection solution being able to capture the tube data and save it in a format that the majority of bending machines can directly read. This has dramatically reduced down time for Tubeworx as they can now measure a customer's tube and in real time feed the precise data into their bending machines. Time taken for Tubeworx to reproduce tubes has now been reduced from several hours for complex tubes down to mere minutes - an enourmous improvement to their bottom line.

Once any tube has been produced it is then simply a matter of running the non-contact probe over the new tube and instantly an inspection report is produced for the customer and is automatically archived away.

With a broad range of non-contact tube probes and bender interfaces available the ROMER Tube Inspection Arm is truly a game changer for anyone involved in the fabrication of complex tubing.

Here are just some of the benefits and capabilities provided by this unique system:

• Eliminate waste and guesswork from tube bending. Measure the first tube from a bender and then automatically calculate bend corrections required for subsequent tubes. This dramatically reduces startup scrap and significantly reduces the time for production.
• Communicate bend correction values directly to a CNC bending system reducing time and eliminating operator data entry errors.
• There's no faster or more accurate way to reverse engineer a tube. Measure a prototype tube, send the design to the bender, automatically compute the bend corrections and the next tube is identical to the prototype.
• Generate tube design quickly and easily by recording the intersection points along the tube route to generate a final tube specification to send to a bender. This can be done even if the tube is fixed in a routed position.
• Inspect thin, flexible tube and wire shapes without touching them for the most accurate results obtainable.
• Effectively calculate end-to-end or cut length of a tube based on the tube's geometry.
• Certify hard checking fixtures quickly and easily without the expense or lost production time sending fixtures out for verification.

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