If a surface preparation process is trusted to bond propeller blades, it can be trusted with your components too.
That's the standard one of our aerospace customers holds their bonding process to. Their incumbent system had been preparing composite propeller blades for bonding, but it was starting to hold them back.
Their composite propeller blades, up to 2.4m (8ft) long, needed consistent surface preparation ahead of bonding. Leading edge bonding leaves no room for inconsistency. Get it wrong on a propeller blade and the results show up in the air, not on the factory floor.
The incumbent process itself was reliable, but it was manual: operators wet blasting large blades by hand, on their sides, inside a machine that was taking up more floor space than the operation could spare. As demand grew, that approach couldn't keep up.
We replaced their legacy system with the Leopard Cub, our tall, compact automatic wet blasting machine. Standing over 5m (16ft) tall, it handles propellers of different sizes using recipes programmed and stored directly in its PLC (programmable logic controller). Housed vertical and horizontal oscillation axes traverse the blast guns across the full length of each blade, guided by its position on the turntable. Manual blasting is no longer part of the process.
The result: a safer job for every operator, a smaller footprint on the factory floor, and the same repeatable, bond-ready surface on every blade, every time.
This is surface preparation engineered for one of the most safety-critical bonds in aerospace. If it's precise enough for that, it's precise enough for your components too.
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