Bowers Air Gauge tooling can be configured in a variety of ways for a range of applications. All Bowers Air tooling can be customised to suit your application and meet the specific measurement needs of your business.
Air tools can gauge a part for roundness. For two-point out-of-round conditions, a standard two-nozzle air tool can be used. If lobing exists in the part, an odd number of nozzles must be used, depending on the number of lobes.
A common application of Air Gauging is to dynamically measure the straightness or “bow” of an inside or outside diameter. In this case, a custom designed air plug makes verifying a part’s straightness simple and fast. (A straightness air plug cannot be used to measure diameter).
To determine squareness of a part, for example a bore to a face, air nozzles configured as a “z” are used with dynamic measurement to change the back-pressure from square to out of square conditions.
Multiple nozzles are equally located about the circumference of the air tool to allow for average size measurement. Commonly used for thin-walled or out-of-round parts — four, six, or more nozzles are utilised, depending on the tool size.
The measurement of grooves is conveniently achieved with flat, blade-type air tools. Air Gauging not only determines groove size, but with exploration around the workpiece, parallelism of the groove faces can also be determined.
This Gauge was designed to measure the widths of a crankshaft journals to ensure correct clearance to locate the shell bearings.
Air Gauges are most commonly used for measuring the size and form of inside diameters and outside diameters. Two-nozzle air plugs, with nozzles diametrically opposed, are used for internal measuring, and two-nozzle air rings are used for external dimensions.
Angle variation of tapered surfaces is commonly checked with air gauging as the difference of two diameters. The Bowers Air2 (Firmware 1.2 or later) has DMS (Degree-Minute-Second) capability build in.
A specified clearance between two mating parts is often required to assure proper part operation. The Bowers Air2 allows for the individual display of the bore size, or shaft size and the clearance between the two parts. Operators need only observe the clearance display to determine if the two components have the required match dimension.
Bowers created a 4 channel air plug for a customer which was used to measure the Gudgeon Pin bores in a car engine piston. Designed for use in a closed loop machine tool application, it measures the diameters of the two bores and the co-axial relationship between both bores in one hit. The fitting is designed to be held in the turret of a multi axis machining centre with the measurement process being controlled via PLC as part of the closed loop measuring system.
