Any thoughts?

[88Matt]

Renshaw Sprint?

[THEE THAINZ™]

Looks promising...

[crazy^millman]

I biggest question is how to you drive it? Once you do drive it what and how do you use the information? I looked at the videos and it all goes back to my conversation for many years. Why use the CNC as a CMM? Want to spot check things and want to keep a machine running in a lights out condition okay that is one things, but this is for scanning and the process of collecting data using a scanning method verse a point collection method is a completely different animal. How many points are going to be collected and to what standard are you going to be collecting the data? Checking a cylinder do you spin the part around the axis? No and yes as if the Axis is not 1000% correct you get a bad collection of data. If the axis of travel are not 1000% correct then you get a bad collection of data. What and how is the error mapping of the machine collecting the data done? Are they using a NIST artifact on the machine? How often and to what extent is that being checked? Who is in charge of the collected data? Manufacturing or Inspection? As someone who as been on both side of the isle I see more of a sales gimmick than a real world application process to used on a machine tool.

[Dave Allen]

Fully agree on why would you tie up a spindle for inspection. But must add that ths is a lot faster probing software than I'm accustomed to.

Sure would speed up a lot of basis probing routines but how much is that worth?

[88Matt]

If it works, it will be a HUGE time saver for us.  We currently are going from a .0004" profile tol on our molds .0002".  Once off the machine, tolerance is lost if you have to put it back on the machine because of the CMM report in inspection.  This will also compensate for irregularities in the tool radius.  

[crazy^millman]

That kind of tolerance is almost outside of the traditional CMM Capabilities. I assume your machine has Glass Scales and you have a very robust inspection process already in place. I would like to see to what repeatable tolerance this is capable of holding day in and day out. Yes if you are looking for a way of less handling because you machining process has not been dialed into a process to hold those tolerances then yes. Like I mentioned in another thread. We have customers holding 10 and 15 microns on very high end machines in very controlled environments. Getting down to 5 microns repeatable tolerance is a very specialized area of manufcatruing. We do have customers holding 1 micron tolerance on some of their molds, but they take a good amount of time achieving that tolerance. They have a Ceramic CMM and a very unique machine from what I understand 10 every made in the world. Holding .000039" day in and day out is not easy yes you are talking about .0002", but I would need to know many factors before I could even think about sating this would be a good direction or not. I would be interested in seeing what your company up with and if proves to be successful for your needs.

[THEE THAINZ™]

Out of curiosity what type of material is being used in the mold (if you can say). And what is the mold process? Injection, lost wax, etc. etc.