thunderskunk
Cast Iron
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2018
- Location
- Middle-of-nowhere
Hey folks,
We have three Hexagon CMMs at the aerospace shop I work at, and I'm familiar enough with PC-DMIS to know it's a pain in the butt. That said, the value of a DCC CMM in any machine shop is unquestionable. Little old me with my single fanuc robodrill would love to have one small enough to fit in the garage. It would save me thousands worth of inspection equipment such as sunnen bore gauges, larger micrometers, specialty tools, fixtures, etc.
CMMs are not cheap though. With good reason, but there's definitely no low-end version. I love the idea of the Renishaw Equator, but it's only a comparitor and goes for 30k new. Add another 15k or so and Verisurf will retrofit it to have a CMM capability, but... why not just buy a CMM?
Here's an idea: You take a design for a gantry DIY CNC router, build it really stinkin square, add a wired probe, use Mach3 with a probing routine, output the measurements in CSV, and use excel to generate a report. Heck, you can even use encoders for position.
Total might be... $1500-ish? You're not going to get .000001" accuracy, but probing programming has come a long way, and if you're just measuring hole diameters and feature locations, it automates feature inspection at a fraction of the cost it would be to attain the real thing.
What do you think? Worth a shot?
We have three Hexagon CMMs at the aerospace shop I work at, and I'm familiar enough with PC-DMIS to know it's a pain in the butt. That said, the value of a DCC CMM in any machine shop is unquestionable. Little old me with my single fanuc robodrill would love to have one small enough to fit in the garage. It would save me thousands worth of inspection equipment such as sunnen bore gauges, larger micrometers, specialty tools, fixtures, etc.
CMMs are not cheap though. With good reason, but there's definitely no low-end version. I love the idea of the Renishaw Equator, but it's only a comparitor and goes for 30k new. Add another 15k or so and Verisurf will retrofit it to have a CMM capability, but... why not just buy a CMM?
Here's an idea: You take a design for a gantry DIY CNC router, build it really stinkin square, add a wired probe, use Mach3 with a probing routine, output the measurements in CSV, and use excel to generate a report. Heck, you can even use encoders for position.
Total might be... $1500-ish? You're not going to get .000001" accuracy, but probing programming has come a long way, and if you're just measuring hole diameters and feature locations, it automates feature inspection at a fraction of the cost it would be to attain the real thing.
What do you think? Worth a shot?