Measurement systems provide precision for Toyota

A Newall Measurement Systems product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 7, 2003

Toyota Motorsport's ongoing success in the South African production car racing championship, rally championship and off-road racing championship has been attributed to a number of factors.

Toyota Motorsport's ongoing success in the South African production car racing championship, rally championship and off-road racing championship has been attributed to a number of factors, including the highly accurate Topaz digital readout and robust Spherosyn encoder system from Newall Measurement Systems.

The long and gruelling motor sport season has seen Toyota Motorports successfully develop the team's cars through greater turnaround speeds and more accurate prototyping.

This was possible due, in part, to the Spherosyn digital linear encoder and Topaz digital readout (DRO) specified from Toolquip and Allied, a distributor for Newall Measurement Systems.

William McCallum, Technical Specialist at Toyota Motorsport, says Toyota's year-round campaign of designing, prototyping and manufacturing new components to boost performance and reliability hinged on the measuring equipment provided by Newall.

"The DRO and encoder have been on our manual milling machine for a year now", William explains.

"They've become a vital part of our tooling setup, especially in prototyping, where maybe three or four parts can be built from one prototype.

If the prototype is wrong, we end up scrapping four parts - and that's expensive".

Since the introduction of the ball-based encoder system, William says the Toyota team has been able to modify, and therefore fit, engine blocks and gearboxes more accurately, reduce the impact of expensive modifications and, most crucially, save time.

"If you want a job modified by a technician, you want it done as soon as possible.

If we didn't have the digital readout and linear encoder, we would have to measure the milling machine's movement by conventional methods, and that's when errors can occur".

The Spherosyn digital minimises measurement mistakes by achieving accuracy levels of +/-10um +5um/m, resolutions of up to 1um and repeatability within one resolution count.

Speed is also an issue and Newall's digital encoder is able to achieve traverse rates of up to 20m/s at 10um resolution and 2m/s at 1um resolution.

However, as the Spherosyn digital shows none of the wear characteristics usually associated with glass encoders, the need for costly replacements, cleaning and maintenance is removed - again saving time.

Toyota's manual milling machine was also fitted with a Topaz two-axis DRO, which provides absolute or incremental operation with linear error compensation, inch-to-metric conversion and continuous data memory.

Used in conjunction with Newall's Spherosyn linear encoder, the Topaz DRO offers accurate measurement and vastly improved accuracy.

For William and the Toyota Motorsport technical team, it's all about time.

"It speeds up the whole process", he says.

"You can move to any point and zero the axis.

It means you can start working without having to perform a host of time-consuming calculations.

It's so easy to use".