Patent ID: 7308130

Claim:
A method of inspecting an input shaft for use in a power steering system, said method comprising the steps of: providing said input shaft which has a plurality of slots formed at equal intervals in a circumferential direction thereof and first and second chamfers formed at left and right sides of the slots; cleaning foreign substances adhering to the input shaft at a cleaning position; loading the input shaft from the cleaning position into an inspecting position; causing first and second cameras to photograph the first chamfer in an initial slot and the second chamfer in another slot of the input shaft, which is loaded at the inspecting position, in a direction normal to each of the first and second chamfers to acquire image data of the first and second chamfers, respectively; processing the respective image data of the first and second cameras by means of a computer program and overlapping a central line between left and right edge lines of the first or second chamfer with a standard line of an image array coordinate system; calculating distances between the left and right edge lines of the first and second chamfers in an overlapped state and then calculating width values of the first and second chamfers; calculating width values of all remaining first and second chamfers while stepwise rotating the input shaft repeatedly by a predetermined angle; and determining whether the input shaft is superior or inferior based on the calculated width values of the first and second chamfers.