This Issue

Assembly at Smart Products

Liquid Courage Still Going Strong with
Smart Products' Valves

Featured O-ring Material: Buna-N

Upcoming Tradeshows 

Assembly at Smart Products

By-hand and automation, we ensure you get quality parts - and fast! 

Extremely efficient and precise, our assembly process for valves will get you quality parts and fast. 

At Smart Products, our assembly process is a combination of hand assembly and automation, and we prefer it this way for several reasons.  The main reason is that we would not be able to customize every valve by body material, o-ring, and opening spring pressure if we had only one set standard via automation.  None of our valves are “off the shelf,” and we take several steps during the assembly process to further ensure you receive the perfect valve for your specific design criteria.  For example, if your application calls for an opening PSI of 10, we wind our springs to open precisely at this pressure for this particular order – a fully automated assembly process would prevent us from being able to easily and quickly adjust the springs to different pressure levels for various orders. Not only have we found the technology lacking to wind springs for short runs (we have a minimum ordering policy of 25 valves), but we find that you can’t efficiently customize the internal components of our valves by strictly relying on machines to assemble the right combination – and we have over 3 million possible combinations.

Assembly Supervisor Jessica Barragan adds, “For our unique niche, [assembly] by hand is often better. Machines are good, but someone has to check them.  Our assemblers are great at catching things, and they enjoy assembling and checking for quality.”

Although we highly value testing our valves by hand, we also use our own specialty tooling and machines where automation adds the most benefit to our assembly, which makes the process even more efficient and fast.  Developed by our engineers for our Series 300 Modular Valves, it has the ability to close and latch valves, check for missing o-rings, perform a leak test, and much more.  A person is always in place while this particular machine runs to ensure each valve is accurately assembled. 

When a particular valve or order is not a good fit for this machine, we use other specialty tooling to keep the creation and assembly process of our valves within our two week lead time.  We also have the option of using a press to assemble valves, which is preferable versus the automated machine when a valve has a unique need such as 80 durometer o-rings.  Due to the hardness of an 80 durometer o-ring, it will not smoothly run through an automated machine.

“We have a process in place for every order, which is ISO documented.  And, all of our assemblers are trained for each procedure created.  When new or returning orders come in, we do a step by step review and follow the procedures set into place for each job – whether it is an order for 25 or 100,000 valves,” continues Barragan. 

For large or small valve orders, we go above and beyond to ensure you get a quality, customized part for your particular application.  If you have more stringent assembly requirements or questions, call one of our Product & Application Specialists at (800) 338-0303 or email sales@smartproducts.com.   
 

Liquid Courage Still Going Strong with Smart Products' Valves

Sean McKean Wins U.S. Title Series Season Opener