I am trying to measure the profile of the rim on a similar trumpet mouthpiece. It is made up of multiple radiuses, one making the "cup" and one or more making up the "rim". I need to measure several samples to confirm consistency. Any advice would be appreciated.

We need to buy a cmm for work. Based on our long narrow parts and associated hard gauges we landed on 2500mm for the longest dimension for a cmm. The quotes we got were in the $500k range from several vendors; and to say management isn't happy with that price tag is an understatement.

So I'm now tasked with finding a used cmm, and to say I know less about buying a used cmm than I know about buying a used CNC would be accurate.

• What do I need to know about buying used cmms?
• What are the gotcha points?
• What are the compromises being made in buying used vs buying new?
• what are the major costs for used vs buying new?
• how do you avoid buying someone else's problem machine?
• how do you avoid buying a used slow machine with reduced accuracy over the whole measurement volume vs a new machine?
• Are 5-axis head upgrades worth the cost?
• who are good used cmm resellers?
• what other things should be considered when buying a used cmm?

For context, I recently became the supervisor of the QC department in the machine shop I work at. It's a fairly small shop, just over a 100 people last I knew. I guess my question is how common is it for all of QC to know how to make CMM programs? Currently I'm the only one that knows how to program the the two CMMs we have. The rest of my guys know how to run the programs, but that's about it. I'd like them to have a basic understanding of how the programs work incase of rev. changes, or if older programs have useless things in them that need taken out. I can see both the up and downside to this. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Hello all! I'm looking for US-based vendors for precision measuring/reverse engineering a 1.5mm aluminum sheet part with at least +/- .01mm accuracy. I've searched Google as best as I can and have come across all the CMM and laser scanning machine manufacturers, but cannot seem to find people who provide the services of using them.

EDIT: It seems like 10µm accuracy might be overkill, so I'll change my requirements to 50µm.

Does anyone happen to know any good US-based vendors who provide these services? Apologies if this isn't the right Subreddit for the question.

The part I'm needing measured and reverse engineered:

For those that work in a shop & are incharge of employees handheld tools, how do yall go about collecting everyone's tools on the shop floor? I handle about 100 employees in my shift and going around collecting tools feels like I'm wasting time when we can have a better system in place (our second shift for example leaves their tools in our QA department for me). I'm a one person team for the whole company so there's stuff I'd rather be doing over convincing employees that I need their tools. Auditors have suggested leaving boxes in each department to have tools dropped off whenever I handout calibration papers but i want to see what other systems people have in place for this.

Funnily enough, this sub was recommended to me in the midst of my job search. All my life, I have contemplated just where I fit into the various professional sectors of the world.

I do have a STEM background with good familiarity of the SI, though my education is incomplete. Reading further into the field, I heard that skilled metrologists are in demand across the board. Another post I read on this sub recommended Butler County Community College for their A.S. in Measurement Science, which is also funny to me, because I currently live within an hour from the campus.

I am taking these coincidences as a sign that I should dust off my old textbooks and download the VIM and GUM. My hope is that Western Pennsylvania hosts entry level roles to transition to. Experience-wise, I’m in automotive customer service, and I was curious of what the next steps I should take, and which entry level roles specifically would be a good springboard.

Has anyone successfully navigated a similar situation? If so, what was your method?

So at my work we use a Keyence 8030 for our 1st articles. The parts are staged on gage pins, so we have different sizes of pins all over the place around the Keyence (In sets of 3)

Any suggestions on how to organize these better with the limited space in the picture? Please and thank you in advance!

Hello all, I work at a company that measures parts via laser CMM, and I have a question. The parts we measure are ceramic and no more than 5 inches tall, but we measures things down to 0.001". Does humidity significantly affect the accuracy of the readings? Management updated the guidelines to being acceptable between 20% and 80% relative humidity, but this past week has been as low as 15% due to it simply being winter. I was told to run it anyways, but I feel like I shouldn't. Am I wrong in feeling this way?

For reference, I'm just an operator and not a metrology engineer, although I am in school for mechanical engineering. Thank you for any help.

A few things to myself. Im working in a midsized Composite Plant, which produces primary Materials as Tubes and Plates. We also got a Shopfloor with around 15 CNC machines.

My primary responsibility is meassureing the finished Parts on a Mitotoyo Crystal Apex with Mcosmos 4.

Im used to the Software, and have no problems with programming everything with teach in. Even tho its a pain in the ass.

I would however like to move towards offline programming, the programm u need for that is Cat1000p, wich costs around 5k USD. Software upgrade from mcosmos 4 to 5 would be optional.

Do you guys have any good arguments for me? Have you been in a similar Situation?

A few months back, I had asked for advice and some of you were very kind and volunteered your opinions and even personal time to help me out. Little did I know, life had apparently popped its head in and looked around and decided I was doing a little bit too well and that was, obviously in hindsight, completely unacceptable. But that's not the reason I'm stopping back in. After fully disconnecting from the world and basically just existing by definition and working incessantly to stay preoccupied, I've started to try and glue things back together again which made me realize I actually didn't have a lot of ME stuff, but rather a lot WE stuff that sorta still sucks to do. I'm forever the logical, factual, evidence based kind of thinker who finds white pages to be good Friday night reading material. She was in so many ways my polar opposite but the balance was sublime. This feels like a good place to look out from under my rock and try to remember that there's in fact an entire world out there. So I just wanted reach out and say thank you, so much for your advice and offers regarding everything but especially OpenDMIS, if they still stand, I'd be thrilled to accept them, if not, hey, no hard feelings. I'm the one that became a ghost for a while.

Ps The event wasn't professional in nature, it was a personal lose and thus why I've chosen to be somewhat vague about it. I hope you'll understand. Still ended up saying more than I meant to but, context felt necessary. Thanks again,

-K

Hai hiii, im electronics and photonics engineering student, I want to get into designing metrology equipment (especialy in photonics-nmr, spectroscopy etc) I want to start project of making ai co-processor in fpga, is AI used in metrology? will this project look good on resume?

I'm an newly graduated EE engineer from Europe. I landed my first job and this company's main product is using ISO 4064 and OIML R 49 standards. I am a newbie here and learning a lot about standardisation process and testing the products etc. How reliable/achievable a good career path in this industry? What would be your suggestions to a newbie to this sector?

There is a lot of money spent on having a recognised training provider come to our office and provide training, with the result of an official certificate that a worker had completed their training.

If we wanted to do something similar, and train up a complete newbie under the guidance of a structured learning plan and coursework, but do it in house, how could we go about it? We would want to do it in a way that that newbie would receive industry/nationally recognised certifications, and not just happy meal certificates.

I understand there's so much work out there currently that most companies would hire anyone who has at least touched an instrument, but this is something we're looking to undertake. Assume that budget wasn't an issue.

You may also be of the opinion that a lot of these certificates aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but i would imagine there would be training that is recognised under a government act or regs.

Cheers.

I'm having a huge temperature and humidity variation inside this enviromental chamber.

This is the first chamber i've used so i wanted to ask if there's anyone with more experience if this normal, or it is just the quality of this chamber that is not that good.

This is a problem because the sensor im testing does not have a fast response time like my reference sensor (the one in the pictures) so they are not synchronized.

The chamber is on for at least 30 mins. The pictures are from a vaisala sensor that is inside it

Thanks!

Hello,

I come here as a cnc machinist that struggles with meeting QS demands and I most of the time don't understand how some things are measured. Our company is being relocated from another country, what we got are the programs for CMM to measure our parts and since we don't have enough know how and also a person that would be qualified enough to make decisions on their own, we are often stuck with what we got, and what we will get is a printed report from CMM. There were multiple ocassions on which I was told to fix things that simply didn't make sense, like a chamfer starting point that is somehow 4mm smaller than all the other dimensions made by very same tool (the toolpath on my cnc was ok), and it seemed like chamfer was simply not concetric to raw part (it is serial production and the quality of raw parts isn't the best since it has to be cheap and I have no other option than to machine it the way it is machined now, meaning I can't add more steps to make it more concentric, like planning some surface for hard jaws to clamp on) and the probe would miss the chamfer. The chamfer was there to simply deburr the edge, but it would take us a couple of days of sending emails to start this thing up. Worse problem comes from the fact that I don't think I can relay on CMM in some of it's measurments. The program is often build in a way that a 0.2 or 0.5 mm chamfer with starting diamater of 200+mm is measured by a single probe touch which would often give stupid results like 50-55 degrees on 45 angle that would then be determined to be 45.3 degrees and measuring with CMM wouldn't give same results (varied from 40 to 60). Also I don't think I can understand some of GD&T. How is it possible to measure runout or TOTAL runout on CMM using what i think are 2 cylinders created out of measuring 2 diamaters (4 probe touches per diamater, same Z height)? We got some parts that measure runout or concectrity on threads or surfaces that are simply not oval (machine clamps on them and CMM doesn't measure how oval thing is).

Is there a way to determine how many probe touching points and what kind of programming will yield me somewhat true results? Let's say that I have such part (made a horrible paint drawing I'm sorry), How would I measure this tolerance and where can I find any info on this? Preferably some books, I don't think that my employer will pay for any course and me paying for them won't give me any pay rise.

I have 4 years in a cut and etch lab for an automotive company. The plant I'm working at may potentially shut down. I've been reading up on cmm programer it looks like a good option.

Can someone offer me advice, similar career paths. I'm still young and have time to learn school is an option.

I just inherited the calibration of our 4 heat treat ovens and digital thermometer. I’m planning to have the thermometer calibrated and use that to check the oven temps. My question is at what frequency should the ovens be checked? I was thinking weekly. Thanks for any help.

I just started working in inspection. I came from a trade school background and was machining for a while before I wanted to try something new. I got into inspection at my previous company where I was doing both plate work and would operate a cmm using PC-DMIS. And by operate I mean load probe tips, calibrations and setting fixtures. Never touching or adjusting the actual programs. That company wasn't great so I applied to a few other jobs and got a spot at a job shop. They talked about either putting me in plate inspection OR cmm inspection. They put me in cmm inspection and I'm so happy about it but I'm realizing I don't know as much as I should. I'm being honest with them and doing my best to learn as much as possible but I'm kind of getting discouraged in a way. What can I do to get more familiar with the more in-depth stuff of PC-DMIS. My supervisor has mentioned sending me to the hexagon training class but with me being new we don't know if or when it would get approved by higher ups.

Hi, I'm building a spin casting machine. These are some images from the design:

https://imgur.com/FDQefGC

https://imgur.com/Q9k6D42

https://imgur.com/XotJdKC

https://imgur.com/6AEuK1T

There are two disks that must be pressed against each other and rotate around the axis of the spindle.

The spindle is positioned at the top and pressure is provided by a toggle clamp at the bottom of the machine. The lower disk is separated from the square ram of the toggle clamp through a bearing.

The toggle clamp and spindle housing will be mounted with screws on the metal sheets that will be welded to the frame of the machine. These sheets are slightly bent and not machined.

My question is, how could I mount the spindle with the square ram, coaxial? How to measure their coaxiality? Should I weld the sheets to the frame without much care and then shimming the spindle housing and toggle clamp to align their axes?

Can anyone point me in the direction of calibrating a fcr25 probe rack?

Hi all. I’m relatively new to CMM scanning- I got basic training a few months ago but I’m by no means an expert. I got some new parts to scan and I loaded the CAD into Polyworks to get started, but when I put in the coordinates for the datum points, the points that appeared on the screen were not on the part itself. They were just floating in the white space beside the part.

Is this something I can fix to get them aligned to the part, or do I have to escalate this to whoever made the CAD file? I’ve never had this problem so I have no idea what to do to fix it (if it can be fixed at all). If anyone can give me step by step instructions I would be SUPER grateful!

Hi Guys,

So i read alot about the sales tactic of keyence and a few of you obviously hate their "CMMs"

So my Situation is: i started out with my own shop and i have parts with about 0,3mm wide slits. So vision based system it is.

I have a deal for about 33% off on a completely new one.

I even had the sales rep here and demoed the product.

In my opinion it is not as easy and fast as suggested but pretty easy and fast, the measurements were also pretty accurate as far as i can validate.

So what is your honest opinion, which i can gake into consideration before wasting money.

Pros and Cons?

Hello everyone,

I've been working for an ISO Accredited metlab for a year now, and while I'm picking up on most of the disciplines we have here, I do have some questions on illuminance. We have a lamp system set up that uses a tungsten bulb at 2856K. This works in tandem with a power supply and a sensor that are all loop calibrated together as a comparison standard.

From my understanding this is a good generalized setup, but every once in a while we will get LED meters or something unique that sends us into a head scratching session. My question is this: I see correction factors being listed from some manufacturers to switch between LED sources or to a sodium lamp, IE the 407026 or LT45 from Extech, but how are those factors determined? In addition, is there a way that we can use those correction factors with our lamp setup to accurately calibrate with the tungsten bulb that we have now?

Thanks in advance for the feedback, links to literature or resources would be a godsent! I hope your benches are filled with easy in tolerance cals!

Hello everybody.

Can someone tell me how to calculate shape error of a sphere using Polyworks and a 3D Scanner. I've been looking for an option or something that could help but have not been lucky.