Category Archives: Articles

Consider a CMM for Gear Inspection

CMMs offer a capable, affordable and flexible gear inspection option. Gear inspection has long been considered a highly specialized, expensive and difficult part of the gear manufacturing process, requiring a wide variety of complicated gages, testers, dedicated CNC equipment and highly trained experts. But if you want to make good gears, you need to have all that stuff, right? probe picWell, maybe not, says John Fox, senior CMM software application engineer for Mitutoyo America Corporation. According to Fox, the time may be right to consider a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) for your gear inspection needs. “We have many customers who are using a CMM for gear measurement, production and setup,” Fox says. “Customers including Honda, Kawasaki, Hitachi, Molon Motors, etc. use the CMM to measure purchased gears. And there...

Expand Your CMM’s Capabilities

Moving from tactile and scanning systems to newer optical and laser sensor technology increases the productivity of your CMM. During the past 25 years, coordinate measuring machine (CMM) sensor technology has expanded from tactile and scanning systems to now include optical, laser and surface finish sensors, effectively expanding the CMM’s capabilities. While each CMM sensor technology has its own advantages and limitations, the expanded measuring capability provided to the CMM compels anyone with measuring requirements to consider adding additional sensor technology to a current CMM or for a new CMM purchase. OPTICAL SENSOR Optical sensors for CMMs provide non-contact measuring capability that perform [caption id="attachment_4887" align="alignright" width="300"]The process of measuring surface finish begins with selecting the planar area to be analyzed, then positioning the surface finish sensor stylus so that profile being measured (also... </div> <footer class= Read more Comments are closed

CNC CMM Delivers Greater Productivity and Accuracy for Automotive Supplier

Looking for speed and accuracy for its unique processes, an automotive supplier incorporates a surface finish probe in a CMM to obtain dimensions and surface testing in a single operation. “In the remanufacturing business, you can take apart a transmission, clean it, replace all the soft parts and get it back to the customer when they need a new part,” said Gary Noel, chief operating officer and member of the board at Dynamic Manufacturing, a premier supplier of world-class OEM new and remanufactured drivetrain components for the automotive industry. “The real creativity comes from developing unique processes that can repurpose that experienced part so that it performs as good as new.” Headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Melrose Park, IL, Dynamic Manufacturing is a TS 16949, ISO 14001 and WBENC-certified woman-owned and -operated business with operations covering...

Advances in Model-Based Measurement Can Reduce CMM Programming Time

While manufacturers have applied model-based definition to product definition for some time, they have only recently applied it as a quality assurance process. With more man-hours being spent on programming work, differences in worker-created measurement programs, and inefficient programs being created due to proficiency issues, the industry has moved from 2-D drawings to 3-D annotated models. A number of factors—the increased emphasis on quality control, the growing diversity of parts and components being measured, the development of more complex global supply chains and reduced product lifecycles—have led to a considerable demand for automatic measurement programming in recent years. Automatic measurement program generation software uses 3-D CAD and product manufacturing information (PMI) to enable one-click automated generation of measurement programs. A complex program that previously would have taken five hours to complete manually can now be completed in...