A COMPLETE TOLERANCE CHARTING SYSTEM IN ASSEMBLY

The process of assigning tolerances in product design, more often than not, will affect the functionality and cost of the product. An unnecessarily tight tolerance leads to higher cost while an excessively loose tolerance may lead to malfunctioning of the product. Traditionally, this important phase of tolerance allocation is done intuitively to satisfy design constraints based on the skills and experience of the designers. In most cases, the result is not optimum and modification of the allocated tolerances is required. After the tolerances are allocated, the next step is to ensure that the assembly can be manufactured with the resources available. This can usually be verified by performing tolerance charting for the assembly. However, if the result shows that the blueprint (B/P) tolerances specified are too tight, the entire process of tolerance allocation and tolerance charting has to be repeated. This paper presents an efficient method of integrating the process of allocating optimum B/P tolerances in...