Challenge: An industry leading defense contractor required a partner to provide innovative ideas to an ancient design for military hand grenade fuses. The customer had a long standing reputation as an innovative, quality driven supplier to the United States military for more than 40 years.
Solution: The project was replacing an old pyrotechnic fuse for military hand grenades with a more dependable electromechanical fuse. The old fuse was unreliable and had a limited shelf life. The new fuse needed to be reliable, generate a consistent voltage when activated as well as being lightweight and compact.
Stork Kelch provided the solution through its solenoid manufacturer and provided an magnetic impulse generator. The design was lightweight and compact, but still had to withstand stringent military testing for reliable voltage output. Utilizing Stork Kelch's vast resources, the customer was provided a lot and facilities for testing of both repeatability and validation. The part was tested in many different environments for more than 200 hours and the design proved to be solid.
Even after the innovative design was completed, tested and verified, it had become cost prohibitive. Stork Kelch know-how found ways to reduce the cost without sacrificing performance; unique steel materials, thinner wire gauge, less expensive magnets and a different bobbin material reduced the tooling and piece cost by 25 percent.
Contact Stork Kelch to learn how our know-how can improve your reliability while reducing costs.
