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Warranty, Installation, Repair and Calibration (WIRC) Shop

I thought we should send out a short note about what’s going on at IR’s WIRC Shop lately. It’s been nothing short of crazy. We have ramped up our commitment to you, our clients, to service just about everything we sell and many things we don’t sell.  This includes competitor’s equipment and other NDT products that may not be part of our regular inventory.

One area that we have been expanding our skillset on is ultrasonics. As the Sonatest line that IR carries takes off, we are now able to support each purchase.  Repairs and calibrations will be one of the ways we do this. While we already service thickness gauges, our team has received training from Sonatest on flaw detectors, and are now performing calibrations.  Repairs are something that we are working on as well.

In addition to ultrasonic equipment, we are factory authorized for, or capable of, repairing and/or verifying calibrations of:

  • Comet X-ray tubes as well as other x-ray equipment
  • Sentinel equipment as well as most iridium, cobalt and selenium projectors
  • Magnaflux and all other brands of yokes
  • Magnaflux and all other brands of UV lamps
  • Light boxes and film viewers
  • JME crawlers
  • Survey meters and electronic dosimeters
  • Vidar digitizers
  • Hardness testers
  • Densitometers

Plus, we are currently in the process of training in light meter calibrations.

IR has been growing again and for those of you who haven’t been by in a while there are some new faces at the shop. This growth is partly due to IR’s expansion into aerospace and the nuclear industries. Supplying those two industries means we increase our attention to quality. One aspect of this is the prevalence of counterfeit parts. Though this is a major problem in the aerospace industry it is becoming a problem in all industries. Now that IR is moving deeper into the electronics world, both our QA and mechanical parts are evolving. The last thing we want to do is repair your equipment with a part that is not OEM authorized or sell you a counterfeit part.

In the past, counterfeiting has been a particular problem for QSA and Sentinel parts with their exposure devices. We have been working on some ideas around this, and taking steps to stop the unauthorized distribution of OEM parts. It is a breach of our vendor contracts to sell parts to unauthorized distributors.  It is also part of our quality assurance program to see that these parts are used as intended—QA is the new safety.

We are in the quality business. It’s important to us. Because of this, we plan to initiate prequalification for OEM retail parts, on top of our own purchasing requirements. This will really be apparent for critical equipment like flaw detectors, exposure devices and other NDT test equipment. All parts will be OEM approved and all sales of parts to clients will need to be approved. It seems that parts, or rather critical parts, will likely start becoming harder to get as these ISO and industry quality initiatives and controls become a larger part of our daily lives.

Before I end this note I should mention that when delivering equipment for repair, any and all details of the problem and/or incident that caused the problem should be submitted with the equipment, along with any accessories that were used at the time. This is especially important when assessing problems with radiography equipment. An incident report will allow us to look for other related issues at the time of the repair.  That’s better that then finding out after you get it back from repair. Radiography equipment has that isotope issue that we need to be concerned about.  Plus there’s the CNSC reporting requirements. If IR knows all the details and we have all the accessories, controls, and guide tubes along with the device and source assembly, we can often foresee CNSC requests and act on them so that you don’t experience a hold-up. It is much safer for our staff as well.

Well that’s enough for now so let me just extend a big thank you for your support and we look forward to helping you solve whatever equipment problems you may be having, right here at IR’s WIRC Shop.

And remember…For the unknown there’s NDT, for NDT there’s IR

Cheers!

Brian Sargent
IR Supplies and Services