Mecelec Design has designed and built a machine for cleaning residual oil from both the internal and external surfaces of high pressure fuel injection pumps. This involves tilting the pump in various orientations while rotating the internals of the pump. The machine extracts the lubricating oil from one area of the pump while also extracting a test fluid from another by supplying compressed air to one port and drawing vacuum on another. This allows the fluids to be collected in a pair of catch tanks and reused, resulting in significant cost savings versus leaving the oil in the pump.
This machine also performs some other functions. The pump drive gear needs to be positioned with a mark feature exactly at top centre when all functions are finished, to allow it to be fitted on the production line without checking the alignment. To achieve this, the relative position of two indexing points is recorded during the process and at the end the gear is set.
The machine can also be used with two variations of pump with some of the required ports in different locations so each pump is barcode-scanned and the tooling repositioned as required.