CNC West Dec jan 2019

If it has to check down a 4” bore it knows to go over and get the 6” styli. We told the old machine what to do, now we feed the Altera the model and tell it what we want to measure. It decides what the best and most efficient way to measure is. It will raise the probe just above a part and speed along to the next measurement. It scared us the first time we saw how close it came to crashing into the part, but now we know and trust it.” The IMT team is has a lot of experience dealing with prints, but not as much when it comes to models. More and more their customers, especially the aerospace ones are moving to all model based system. “All the specs, all the tolerances, everything is in the model,” continues Zack. “We needed to be better prepared now and in the future. Most of the people I interview for inspector posi- tions are familiar with CMM Manager so it makes hiring people a lot easier. We got 1 year of unlimited tech sup- port and our quality manager Pete is taking advantage of it every chance he gets.” Three people went through the training program for the Altera CMM, but most of the information is being passed down from Pete to the other inspectors. “I had a little trouble originally with the mod- els,” admits Pete. “I wasn’t used to working with models so it took a little time to get things working the way I wanted. Tech support was great in understanding what I needed, and how best to accomplish it. They pop onto our system with Team Viewer and go through any questions or is- sues. I never thought I would use the interchangeable sty- lus as much as I do. We didn’t have that ability before, and it was something I didn’t know I needed. We got a job in recently from a NewMexico based laboratory with a wide range of features on it that need to be inspected. It would have taken forever on the old machine. The new head and styli have come in very handy. You pick feature and just tell it what to do. The software is fairly flexible, allowing you to edit on the fly if you need to.” “When you only produce one or two parts at a time quality has to be dialed in right out of the gate,” concludes Zack. “We don’t have days of production to fine tune a process. Producing the part right the first time is man- datory. Verifying that quality on our new Altera CMM is faster and more accurate than we had hoped. No one in the shop misses the MS DOS, and our customers love our added capabilities.” Large vacuum chambers are a house specialty at IMT Precision. Some of them are the size of a small room. These are on the smaller scale of their capabilities.