When Peter Eickworth and André Kuhn, the two executive directors, stroll through the Eickworth Modellbau factory they are surrounded on all sides by humming, buzzing, howling and rattling. CNC machines the size of garages mill components out of huge, heavy aluminium blocks in a relentlessly meticulous process. The employees produce, assemble and test until everything fits precisely, down to a hundredth of a millimetre.
“The diameter of a hair is seven hundredths of a millimetre, but that level of accuracy would be totally inadequate for our measuring equipment. A hair’s breadth is nowhere near accurate enough for us,” Peter Eickworth says proudly. The executive director of Eickworth Modellbau represents the third generation of his family in charge of the company. Precision is his blood.
Enabling testers to test
Eickworth is an important partner for the automotive and aerospace construction industries. The long-established Bremen company produces testing and measuring equipment, as well as gauges for quality assurance. These are forms or fixtures into which work pieces, e.g. those used by Mercedes on their production lines, can be inserted before assembly to test their size and interfaces for accuracy.
QA departments of manufacturing companies and suppliers use them continuously to check that the size of components remains constant. Their aim is to detect errors in the production process before they are replicated thousands of times. To ensure that these measuring devices always produce correct results, Eickworth uses far greater precision in their production than is required for the components they will be used to test later on, such as mudguards, for example. They set themselves very high standards, and have been meeting them since 1920.
