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PROBING ON NC MACHINES IS MADE EASIER WITH NEW SOFTWARE THAT IS BASED ON A POPULAR CMM SOFTWARE SYSTEM.
Producing parts and making sure that they are up to par as dose to the production line as possible is a goal of many manufacturers. More and more, companies are looking for ways to bring measurement to the shop floor, including the use of robust, inline coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), vision systems and now numeric control (NC) machine tools.
NC machines that support automatic tooling are in production lines across the country. The use of these machines for part test and inspection is hampered by the need to write specific macros to do the inspection and because the end user might not want to take the NC machine out of production in order to program that measurement routine.
Recently, a number of new products have entered the market to facilitate in-process, on machine-tool processing including high-speed probing technology and dimensional measurement software.
Wilcox Associates Inc. (Danville, CA), a Hexagon Metrology company, has recently introduced PC-DMIS NC, a software program geared to programming inspection routines for NC machines.
Reduce scrap and rework
Reducing scrap and rework is the goal of any measurement system situated in an inline process environment. The theory is to find any faults in the part before additional processes are done to the...