From protecting our military service personnel to locating victims of natural disasters, drones make our most dangerous jobs safer. They’re endlessly versatile, and people are finding new ways to use drones all the time. That’s why the use of drones continues to expand to many new sectors of society, and their popularity is only expected to grow.
For people who use drones every day, as well as for the companies that build them, nothing is more important than knowing their drones are high-quality, reliable, and safe. And in order to ensure this trusted level of safety, it’s necessary to use quality torque tools when manufacturing drones.
The Right Drone Tools Ensure Safety
Providing safe drones can be a complex job, and drone manufacturers have their work cut out for them. If drones aren’t built right, they can break, causing potentially catastrophic results. If a fastener isn’t tightened properly, it can vibrate loose, damaging parts or completely disabling a unit. If this happens while a drone is performing an important job, like monitoring a forest fire or delivering medicine, the consequences can be severe.
Not only do people depend on safe drones, but drone safety is also mandated by law. Manufacturers need solutions that can document each fastener a tool screws in, creating a paper trail for the FAA and military inspectors. With so many details and so many things that can go wrong, how can high-quality drones ever get off the assembly line and into the hands of people who need them?
If your business has to deliver safe drones that meet regulatory requirements, you need the ability to control torque—and that means having the right tools for the job. Torque tools ensure that each threaded fastener has just the right amount of torque. When used in conjunction with screw counters or DC control systems, they can also document the correct status of each fastener. And if you’re producing large numbers of drones per day, this ability becomes a valuable asset, fast.
The right torque tools can prevent catastrophic failures that are dangerous, expensive, and bad for your company’s reputation. Maybe best of all, they give you the confidence of knowing that every drone you produce is of the highest quality and won’t lose a threaded fastener.
Drone Tools Improve Process Control and Regulatory Compliance
Top drone manufacturers rely on torque tools to ensure their drones are functional and safe. Without them, manufacturers have no way of knowing which fasteners are exactly right. High-quality torque tools offer many other benefits, including:
- Greater amounts of quality control
- More precise levels of compliance with federal or military regulations
- Increased productivity
- Lower rejection rates
- Standardization across individual units or between production facilities
Torque is tricky. Too much, and a fastener can break, strip, warp, or fall out. Too little, and it can just fall out right away. Getting torque right is an exacting science, and top drone manufacturers know it’s better to prevent problems then to go back and fix them. Let’s examine the two main reasons why having the right torque tools is so important.
- Process Control: Process control refers to all the procedures that produce drones and ensure their quality. Torque tools are used to confirm that a manufacturer’s method of screwing in fasteners is stable, predictable, and consistently performing well. Without process control enabled by torque tools, torque levels in individual fasteners may vary or have inconsistent documentation. In short, process control reduces risk and improves accuracy.
- Regulatory Compliance: If you’re a drone manufacturer, you already know that regulatory compliance is crucial. Quality torque tools help manufacturers comply with FAA and military standards in different ways. The FAA demands that all manufacturers practice quality control that they can demonstrate with documentation. With torque tools, every bolt on your drone has FAA-compliant quality control and documentation built in. These tools also make it easier to maintain gauge requirements laid out by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001. Plus, they make it easy to comply with regulations set by the branches of the military.
The Best Torque Tools for Drone Manufacturers
The torque tool you need can vary depending on the type of fastener you’re securing. Most fasteners sized for drones can be correctly applied using electric screwdrivers. Fast and accurate, these screwdrivers hook into a screw counter or DC control system nicely. When dealing with larger bolts, it may be best to use cam-over wrenches or pulse tools, which use pressurized air to give you more power and control.
To meet all of these requirements, you’re going to need tools that produce specific amounts of torque, precisely. Different tools may be needed for different aspects of production. So, make sure you have tools which can deliver small amounts of torque, such as a few ounce-inches, for miniature components. You may also need tools able to provide large amounts of torque, such as hundreds of foot-pounds, for structural fasteners.
Deliver Top Drones Without a Screw Loose
From hobbyists to military and business decision-makers, customers count on your drones. If you don’t want your bolts falling out, make sure you’re using torque tools. They offer the most efficient way of making sure every fastener is correctly secured with the right amount of torque on every drone you produce. Loose fasteners can cause catastrophic failures that are bad for your customers and bad for your business. So, prevent loose fasteners before they even leave your production facility.
Choose torque tools built by a tool provider that has a deep insight into your industry’s challenges and into drone design and manufacturing itself. After all, you can only build quality drones using quality tools.
