Reinforcing Coil Cords: 2800% More Flex Life for Handheld Measuring Devices

Customer Challenge

Aptiv has a long-time customer for whom we’ve made thousands of coil cord assemblies that were being used in a handheld measuring device in an automotive factory without issue. Seemingly out of the blue, our customer was reporting major failures with flexing the coil cords. The customer came back to Aptiv to determine the root cause and come up with a solution.

Challenge Review

As a vertically integrated manufacturer making the bulk cable, coil cord assemblies and tooling, our quality and engineering teams reviewed the failures – looked at samples, investigated materials, reviewed production processes, inspection processes etc. while simultaneously collaborating with our customer to see if anything changed on their end.

After working together, we determined that when we started this program with our customer, the coil cord assemblies were being used in measuring devices in a quality lab setting and being handled relatively gently. The customer changed their process and instead of sending parts to the quality lab to be inspected, they put the measuring devices on the production floor so operators could do their own measuring and the devices were being handled much more roughly.

Aptiv Solution

We worked with the customer to understand how the handheld measuring devices were being used and re-designed the strain relief on the back of the connector, modified the mold tooling at our in-house machine shop, and put coil cord pieces through rigorous and aggressive testing to show our customer a 2800%+ increase in flex cycles.