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 (ECUs). 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, 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 functions of the vehicle as disparate as engine monitoring, fuel supply, airbag 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). Providing necessarily robust protection for the electronics, 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 lines 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 / Continental Automotive Systems www.conti-online.com  – 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 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.

So the examples of Clamason’s complex, EMI-shielded, automotive ECU housings pictured herewith are (clockwise from top left): the Motorola base for Volvo’s Penta engine followed by its mating Motorola top, both made from galvanised mild steel, a zinc-plated mild steel top cover for Clamason customer Hitachi destined for Nissan and Renault models and, finally, an aluminium grade 5005 top cover for Clamason customer Delphi going into Renault and Ford cars.

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.

For more information on these products & applications, please contact:  
Tim Jones, Business Development Manager, CLAMASON INDUSTRIES LTD, Gibbons Industrial Park, Dudley Road, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 8XG, U.K.   Tel: +44 (0)1384 408 513,  fax: +44 (0)1384 279 222, 
email: timj@clamason.co.uk  Web: www.clamason.co.uk

Example . . . The layout of a telematics module for Motorola (now Continental Automotive Systems) :-
1  Main processor
2  GPS
3  Integrated telephone Connections:
4  GPS antenna
5  Main antenna
6  Emergency antenna
7  Bluetooth antenna.