The surfaces characteristics of technical products have a critical impact on their performance, lifespan, and visual appearance. Further complicating component inspection, many industries surface roughness tolerances parameters are narrowing.

Although a wide range of static surface roughness measuring instruments are now readily available, when a company’s requirement is for a precise, easy and quick to use portable surface roughness instrument, the options are relatively limited.

After searching for a suitably accurate and efficient portable means of inspecting the surfaces characteristics of ground components, the technical staff of Gosport-based Kingsbury’s Grinding Division opted for the advanced Handysurf+ instrument.

In addition to delivering the high-levels of precision required, the robust Accretech product had the ability to be easily transported to customers’ premises and to withstand the rigours of shopfloor use.

Kingsbury launched the company’s Grinding Division in 2017 and now represents Haas Schleifmaschinen GmbH in the UK, Ireland and the Middle East with the aim of providing its customers with first-class grinding machines and comprehensive CNC grinding services.

Also, in late 2021, Kingsbury was awarded representation for Studer AG within the Gulf region.
A key element in Kingsbury’s Grinding Division’s success has been its ability to provide its customers with excellent levels of end-to-end support.

In addition to employing highly-skilled personnel, to help ensure the best outcomes for its customers, Kingsbury’s Grinding Division provides its staff with first-class equipment. For example, the recently purchased Accretech Handysurf+ is now being used to gather accurate surface roughness data in pre-qualification trials before the sales of grinding machines, the instrument is also used to aid the development of new processes.

Kevin Ling, Kingsbury Grinding Division application engineer, explained: “As a company, Kingsbury have more than 60 years of experience in supplying highly efficient and cost-effective machine tools and delivering first-class levels of support. Since its launch we have applied Kingsbury’s time honoured levels of customer care to our Grinding Division.

“When demonstrating the effectiveness of our machine tools and showing the complexity of the components we can develop, establishing required surface finish standards is a priority. This is a necessity not only for customer compliance, but also for determining dressing parameters and the optimum grinding wheel specification for best possible performance.

“The purchase of our advanced Accretech instrument provides us with the ability to quickly measure surface roughness with excellent levels of precision. In addition to other uses, our Handysurf+ is employed to prove the exceptional standards of surface finish that our grinding machines are able to achieve and to provide our customer with confidence.

“Also, our Accretech equipment is used to guarantee that our machines continue to deliver expected financial returns to our customers as we assist in the development of new processes and product lines. We work closely onsite with engineering teams across many industries, as the Handysurf+ instrument is portable, it allows for quick and easy application in a live production environment.”

Accretech offers a comprehensive range of high-quality instruments for the use of measuring surfaces characteristics. The company’s products meet a wide variety of requirements regarding resolution, precision, component size and application. Although the Handysurf+, as purchased by Kingsbury’s Grinding Division, is regarded as Accretech’s entry-level surfaces measuring product, the robust, portable instrument boasts a wide range of features that are normally found only in more expensive, static instruments.

Building on the global success of the company’s previous Handysurf instrument, Accretech’s Handysurf+ features an ergonomic design, a simple operating system and intuitive software. Also, whereas the original Handysurf model required users to set a narrow range when measuring with a high resolution, the new, user-friendly Handysurf+ dispense with this requirement. The advanced new instrument has a generous Z-direction measuring range of 370µm, the widest in its class, and achieves a resolution as high as 0.0007µm over its entire range.

Given the less than perfect environments the robust Handysurf+ is able to be used in, the instrument’s 2.4in colour LCD has significantly improved the visibility of its readings. In addition, the provision of clear, graphic representations of measurement results allows on-site verification with the use of various parameters and waveforms.

Simple six-button operation and newly developed UI enables intuitive operation and trouble-free access to multiple analysis functions, whilst waveform types can be easily changed by using a screen located icon.

A useful enlargement function and an automatic Go/No-Go judgment function, established by setting upper and lower limits, are easily accessible. Despite its relatively compact size and portable nature, the Handysurf+ is capable of a wide variety of analyses modes, including BAC, ADC, peak-count and motif analysis.

A choice of three optional drive unit’s allows potential customers to choose a Handysurf+ model according to their individual needs. Standards equipment includes a carrying case, calibration Plate, user’s Guide / Quick Reference, amplifier, tracing driver, pickup, cables, calibration table and a CD-ROM.

If required, by using the supplied USB cable or optional USB memory, inspection certificates can be created from measurement results. Alternatively, results stored on the HANDYSURF+’s internal memory can be downloaded to a PC as a text file.