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When engineers at Pratt & Whitney’s assembly operations in Middletown, Connecticut, set out to determine the final tolerances between a massive Airbus engine and its enclosing nacelle, they face the intersection of thousands of precisely designed dimensions.

Although most of the thousands of parts constituting the engine could be measured individually on traditional granite-table coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) or with custom-designed, hard-tooled gauges, until recently there has been no satisfactory method for accurately measuring the overall engine assembly. During the past few years, the development of portable CMMs has improved the measurement environment by allowing more accurate dimensional data to be collected on the assembly floor. Because most of these portables were little more than digitizers, however, the task of relating measurement information to existing computerized design databases remained a significant obstacle to timely problem identification. Individual manufacturers were still required to develop in-house methods to bridge the gap between dimensional data acquisition and their original CAD data.

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