Welcome to Janicki Industries



<< Back to News List Laser Trackers Deliver Quality at Janicki August 2004
	Founded just over ten years ago, Janicki Industries (Sedro-Woolley, WA) is no run-of-the-mill contract manufacturer. The diversity of 5-axis milled patterns, molds, plugs, and tooling manufactured is noteworthy, but most impressive is the sheer size of the machined components and assemblies produced for the aerospace, marine, and transportation industries. The company's customized milling machines provide huge working envelopes up to 88' x 20' x 8'. This shop floor system allows Janicki to machine large molds and parts in a single setup, which increases accuracy and reduces setup time.
According to John Janicki, vice president, key elements of the company's success are their wealth of experience, quality assurance, and the ability to precision-machine a wide range of materials including carbon fiber and fiberglass composites, steel, aluminum, stainless, Invar, and Inconel. To meet the demands of producing complex, large parts in small production runs, Janicki has years of expertise in design, 3D modeling, data translation, digitizing, reverse engineering, and part verification.
Metrology Team Janicki employs a five-person team of quality assurance engineers to verify all parts meet their client's tolerance specifications. To ensure consistent accuracy, repeatability, and reliability, the metrology group required a high tech approach to industrial measurement and searched the metrology industry for the appropriate technology. Janicki wanted a solution that was reliable, mobile, and adaptable to every type of job they do. The Janicki QA team selected a Leica laser tracking system from the Metrology Division, Leica Geosystems (Norcross, GA), a portable coordinate measuring machine (PCMM) used for inspection, analysis, and component alignment. The company purchased their first Leica laser tracker and immediately put it to the test. The LTD500 and its patented Absolute Distance Meter for point-and-shoot measurements is used to inspect components, molds, and tooling. The laser tracker has also been heavily utilized to align thousands of parts on the large assemblies. Janicki explains, "In manufacturing, everyone wants parts to be accurate, so the downstream work is much easier. We originally bought our first laser tracker to do business with the aerospace industry for quality control tasks like part mating, monitoring shrinkage in material, alignment, and assembly work. But as time has passed, we began to use it more and more across our operations."
	Primary Tool "Almost every job we do today requires the use of a laser tracker, which is our primary QA tool," states Mike Draszt, Metrology Group manager. "Janicki guarantees tolerances, and the Leica laser trackers are used to validate our work. "We have to work in dusty, harsh environments - both inside and outside. So it is not exactly laboratory conditions. The stability of the Leica trackers is amazing, and they are virtually maintenance free." This is true not just in the shop's QA lab, but in their plant and across the country as Janicki ships its equipment and QA staff to work on large scale projects.
Due to the volume of work and demand for inspection, Janicki has recently purchased a second Leica LTD800 laser tracker. This unit yields the fastest measurement cycle in the business for high point density (3000 points/ second), and the longest measurement distance for large volume work of up to 40 meters, according to Leica. On the Job An example of a large scale project for Janicki was a recent job to build trim fixtures for the Joint Strike Fighter program contracted by Lockheed Martin. The program will develop a family of next-generation replacement strike fighter aircraft (F-35 JSF) for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and the U.K. Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. For this project, Janicki produced vacuum fixtures used for trimming aircraft wing panels. The structure was formed from a carbon laminate face sheet that was bonded to a stainless steel substructure before the face sheet was machined to tolerance. Inside the substructure are the vacuum lines that connect to grooves machined into the mold, which securely hold the wing materials during the final trimming. The QA team was called on the job to make sure the tooling precisely held the surface contours of the wing to the tolerances specified by the client. Since Lockheed had already built a wing mold, Janicki ensured the mold and the vacuum fixture were a perfect match.
	Ship Shapes More down to earth, Janicki provides the marine industry with tooling for everything from hulls and decks on 200' luxury custom yachts to patterns for performance kayaks. Westport Shipyard (Port Angeles, WA) recently contracted Janicki to build and assemble a hull mold for a 164' luxury yacht, the largest production yacht ever made. The huge machined hull mold is comprised of 30 fiberglass panels, 14' wide x 35' long, that were shipped to Port Angeles where the yacht would be assembled on a steel cradle. Janicki produced the hull molds, deck mold patterns, and superstructure patterns for the yacht.
"Historically, when you made a large composite hull mold, sometimes twice the size of a building, you would manually create the mold. Boat builders would also build the hull mold where you intended to construct the boat," said Janicki. "Today, we can build the molds in sections, assemble a hull mold on-site, and hold it to a tolerance of 1/8" over a length of 160' This approach is a much less expensive way to build boats, because of its production setting. The huge benefit to marine manufacturers is they can CNC machine the interior work for an absolute perfect fit within the hull. "The QA crew took the laser tracker onsite to Westport Shipyard, and went about aligning the fiberglass panels to exactly match the CAD model of the hull," explains Draszt. "The panels literally stack together to form the bottom of the boat. This part mating and alignment task was precisely executed to their 1/8" tolerance specification. It was one of the largest assembly jobs they have ever completed. This is real-time, on-the-job quality assurance.a very worthwhile effort for the laser tracker. We wanted portability from our metrology instruments, but overall dependability is really the major feature of the Leica laser trackers. We just show up at the work site and immediately start to gather data with this device."


	Janicki to build new composite fabrication facility.		Click here for information on current and future job openings here at Janicki Industries.

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