CNC West Dec jan 2019

CNC WEST December 2018/January 2019 www.CNC-West.com 49 “For example we will measure a 20”x2” area and it has to be within a certain spec. Our smaller vacuum chambers and parts have tighter tolerances and we take them into our QA lab for verification on the CMMs. IMT Precision is an ISO9001:2015 certi- fied company and part of maintaining that level of quality requires having qualified quality tools in inspection. “We had a really old CMM that was starting to have issues and give us bad readings,” details Zack. “It was a great machine for us over the years, but it was from the mid 90’s and still ran MS DOS. No point and click, everything was entering commands. We couldn’t find people to run it and no one wanted to learn on such an antiquated machine. We were getting inaccurate results. A couple of our aerospace customers required certain sur- face measurements that were impossible to get from it.” Zack and the management team looked into the option of doing a ret- rofit to bring it up to current standards, but the price to do that was still high. “Doing a IMT Precision has a variety of large mills they use for machining large vacuum chambers and semi conductors. Their largest mill is a Viper PRW-5340. It has 200” of X travel, 135” on Y and 42”+ on the Z. You can drive a car down between the walls. Their newest machine is a HMG PBM vertical. It has 100” on X, Y is 75”, is super powerful and has a 3-speed transmission.