Remote controlled toys quality inspection

Imagine you just bought a RC Toy as a gift for your son´s birthday. It supposed to be a moment of joy, but what if at the moment he opens the pack, it is broken? Or even worse, he gets injured when he was playing with the toy?  Or imagine other situation, where you have as a hobby, aeromodelism (that in the end, it is just a more advanced RC toy). You just bought a very modern RC helicopter, with several controlling options and a beautiful design, paying for sure a very expansive price.  Anxiously you went to a park wishing to fly it, but in the so expected moment suddenly your helicopter stop to work, and fall down. What if it hit someone on the floor?

Independent of the case, being a simple child toy or an advanced collector`s toy, the end will be the same: Insatisfaction and security risks. 

RC Toy Product quality requirement not only from the customer

It is not by chance that exists all over the world several regulations regarding Toy´s quality and safety. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has a technical committee for Safety of Toys (ISO/TC 181) with the standard catalogue 8124-2:2014 that may be required in some locations.

It covers requirements for mechanical and physical properties, flammability, concentration of certain elements, age determination guideline, among others.

USA, one of the most importants toy´s market in the world, have a strict local regulation by the USA federal toy safety standard, ASTM F963-11, covering  for example quality requirements for  surface coating materials, soluble test for metals,  substrate materials, accessible edges and points, among others.

Even more, this regulation forces that third-party testing and certification is required for toys designed or intended primarily for children 12 and under.

So manufactures should not belittle quality control, to prevent not only a customer insatisfaction but also legal penalties, and based on the requirements examples from ISO and ASTM, is clearly not an easy task.

Lab Testing for Toys & Children Product solution from Asia Quality Control, for example, meets all regulations standards and could perfectly certify the quality and security of a RC toy, meeting this requirement.

What can go wrong: Choosing the best approach to prevent it.

In general, along the manufacturing process, thinking about main possible defects, it is possible to divide an RC toy by the following:

Plastic Parts: wrong dimension, surface deformations, weakness, lower temperature resistance, flammability, toxicity, among others.

Most of then are caused by defects on the injection process in the plastic manufacturing, for several reasons such as machine adjustments, incorrect mold or wrong chemical proprieties of the raw material (polycarbonate or polymer, eg).

So the inspection approach should be very complete, including dimensions measurement, visual inspection, test of physical properties (tensile, hardness, eg) among others.

In some industries the plastics parts are manufactured by suppliers, and for this cases a Incoming Material Inspection strategy would be appropriate.

For those cases where the plastic manufacturing and the toy assembly is on the same production line, a During Production strategy can be suggested.

Electronic Devices: incorrect battery voltage, contacts failures, wrong radio-frequency range, incorrect life cycle, electric engine broken, among others.

Considering these parts are provided from suppliers an Incoming Material Inspection strategy is essential.

Visual inspection and the measure of some parameters may detect some defects, but is highly recommended Lab Testing for Electronics & Electrical Appliance , in order to ensure its reliability and the promised life cycle, ensuring that a cheaper supplier will not at the end cause more issues with defective products.

Final product:

The quality control of plastic and electronic devices itself doesn`t guarantee at the end the toy will be totally approved, because on the assembly process (usually still very manual) a lot of different failures still may be detected.

From smaller issues, such as a wrong color of the parts, or little scratchs, that will not compromise the product functionality to more critical problems, such as loose parts or RC packed with the incorrect toy that will make the product unusable.

A Pre-Shipment inspection , also called Final Random Inspection or Final Quality Control (FQC), would be recommended as well, in order to have the full guarantee in all production phases.

Assuring the main objective requirement: having fun with RC Toys!

A RC toy may refer to fun and joy moments, but the quality assurances of it have to be very serious. Considering all requisitions mentioned on this article, the quality control may be quite complex, but should be faced and at the end will ensure product reliability, compliance and customer satisfaction.