Clamason Industries’ broad spread of pressed metal enclosure solutions for European, Japanese and American automobiles range from airbag inflator housings to casings for in-car entertainment (ICE) systems and engine control units (ECU). From factories at Kingswinford (West Midlands) and Nitra (Slovakia), one-third of Clamason’s present production goes to the automotive manufacturing sector, including World-class customers such as Autoliv, Delphi, Hitachi, Intier, Magna, Motorola, TRW and Zodiac.
Today’s cars rely to a great extent upon ECU’s, consisting of a CPU and associated logic to convey input/output signals that control different functions of the vehicle such as engine monitoring, fuel supply, air bag deployment, anti-lock braking and Hvac, not to mention more future-orientated technologies such as telematics, active suspension control and Drive-by-wire systems.
ECU’s are engine-specific but not vehicle-specific and may be positioned under the bonnet (as a sealed unit) or behind the dashboard (as a non-sealed unit). ECU housings are produced at Clamason in a range of steels and non-ferrous metals either using progression tooling on a 200t Weingarten or 250t Chin Fong Stamtec® Worcester press or, alternatively, on one of the company’s innovative Chin Fong Worcester® transfer press line of six presses located together, with rapid transfer of each pressing between stations by pick-and-place robots.
The transfer press allows the manufacture of highly complex parts with no carry strip and has the facility to reverse the burr side automatically within the process. Meanwhile the 200t and 250t hydraulic presses have beds up to 2.5m long to enable the manufacture of pressings requiring thicker materials, multiple stages, deep draw or a combination of all three.
There are less than half-a-dozen ECU manufacturers in the World, and Clamason provides EMI-shielded enclosure solutions for three of them – Delphi, Hitachi and Motorola – each of whom has a different design approach.
In fact Clamason has been recognised by Delphi Automotive Systems as a “Worldwide Supplier of Choice”. Delphi, headquartered in Troy, Michigan, USA, is the World's largest automotive supplier and Clamason’s largest automotive customer. For their solution, Delphi opt for a deep aluminium casting with an aluminium cover, whereas Hitachi go for a shallow casting with a deep drawn steel cover and Motorola prefer a flat pressed base with, similarly, a folded steel cover. In all cases, built-in features such as bends, grooves and slots are intricate, highly toleranced and customer-specific. The Clamason pressing is often required to be more tightly toleranced than the casting it covers.
These are representative of a wide selection of highly engineered, quality-assured automotive components manufactured and supplied on a just-in-time basis by Clamason Industries to meet the increasingly exacting demands of the international marketplace.
