Kiekert AG, the global leader for automobile door lock systems, now uses digital cross scanners by Nikon Metrology to test the positions and dimensions of sealing lips on door and rear compartment locks. Tactile inspection methods are unable to correctly measure these touch-sensitive and complex free-form components.

It’s about 30 centimeters long, eight millimeters thick, smooth, soft, with a curly form. It’s completely insensitive to cold, heat, damp, dust, or dryness. It can live for several decades—despite the fact that it spends its entire life in the dark. It’s a very special species, unknown even to biologists. It’s a foam gasket seal.

Unnoticed by the human eye, it curls itself up just 10 centimeters from the left or right upper arm of virtually every driver or passenger in the door lock of all vehicles bearing the blue-and-white BMW emblem. Here, between the interior and exterior door panels, is the habitat of the foam gasket seal, and here it fulfills its one and only purpose in life: to seal the vehicle latch-closing system hermetically against moisture and dirt from outside, which ensures that the lock will work anywhere in the world, even in the harshest of conditions. 

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