All Features
Nikon Metrology Inc.
A
few years ago a Missouri-based casting company, O’Fallon Casting, realized that its touch probe-based inspection system was stretched to the limit for most of its rapid prototyping work. O’Fallon Casting took a new approach by installing a cross scanner from Nikon Metrology plus PolyWorks…
Under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Great Lakes Region, Ghafari Associates LLC, a full-service architecture, engineering and consulting firm, was selected to design the restoration of the Chicago Federal Center (CFC…
Keith Kokal
The collapse of the global economy has put a lot of manufacturing companies out of business. Even at this late stage of the recession, there are still auctions of recently closed plants conducted every day. There are many more manufacturers struggling to reduce their operating costs and improve…
With today’s limited internal resources, it’s tough to transform machine maintenance from reactionary to preventive, and ultimately proactive, despite the obvious upsides in higher overall equipment efficiency (OEE), better process control, and lower total cost. Outsourcing this requirement to a…
GKS Global Services
A company based in the U.S. Southwest makes innovative optics for racing cars and other extreme vehicles. Recently the owners, who grew up in Southern California’s skateboard culture, came up with a new product idea for a kick scooter, mainly for kids, based on the design of a skateboard. The…
Direct Dimensions Inc.
In 2009, Direct Dimensions Inc. was approached by Texas A&M University’s Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) with a challenging yet typical 3-D problem. The FRL, while primarily an active teaching facility, also offers both flight and wind tunnel test services. This particular project was for a…
Consider the most fundamental of measurements: the measurement of physical distances, as when we use feet and yards, or meters. Once upon a time, a foot must have been thought of as the size of, well, a human foot, without worrying whose foot exactly. These days, we are no longer satisfied with…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
No quality control system is perfect. Just think “Toyota” in the context of today’s headlines and that should be abundantly clear.
Taking Toyota’s predicament to heart—for any quality manager in any industry—means thinking through where the inherent weaknesses are in production processes and…
The powder metallurgy (PM) process offers manufacturers the ability to produce high volumes of complex parts in a cost effective manner. Many powder metallurgy components go through heat-treat processes producing parts with increased strength or wear resistance. To ensure the quality of the heat…
Capture 3D
Today’s challenges in the turbine industry to meet the ever growing requirement to manufacture parts faster, on schedule, and at reduced costs, have made it apparent to industry experts that traditional inspection methods are too slow and inadequate to achieve the required results. With the…
GKS Global Services
A mechanical engineering firm was contracted to install new cooling equipment in a municipal ice rink’s mechanical room. The challenge was to design the equipment installation without tearing out the old equipment first, and to install some elements and piping that housed the refrigerant around…
Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) are used in practically every industry that requires precise dimensional inspection of manufactured parts. In today’s competitive environment, manufacturers demand CMMs that are accurate, reliable, fast, economical, and provide maximum flexibility with respect…
Located near Montreal, Canada, the Nova Bus manufacturing team was routinely building many hundreds of complete bus frames per year. Production grew as new models were introduced. The addition of a new diesel electric hybrid design necessitated a re-examination of the quality inspection…
Dave Maxham
A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error…
Bob Cramblitt
Although he’s not one for clichés, Rus Emerick, process improvement specialist at Schneider-Electric, endorses this one: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This concept, which dates back to Aristotle, is at the core of an approach called functional analysis that has…
Ron Rode
As “Old Man Winter” continues to toss his wrath at many of us, it is quite easy to turn our thoughts toward warmer, sunnier places. One of those locations we are all starting to think about is Reno, Nevada, the location for the 2010 Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC) hosted by the…
redOrbit
With a silicone rubber “stick on” sheet containing dozens of miniature, powerful lenses, engineers at Harvard are one step closer to putting the capacity of a large laboratory into a microsized package.
The marriage of high-performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for…
A spring-loaded guided core AC-LVDT is an air-extended, spring retracted LVDT offering consistent measurement for dimensional gauging, factory automation, and similar position measurement applications.
Linear variable…
(ISM: Tempe, AZ) -- The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) will present the 95th Annual International Supply Management Conference and Educational Exhibit April 25–28 in San Diego, California. The event includes four days of supply management professional development, training, and networking…
Patrick Beauchemin
Optical comparators, also referred to as profile projectors and contour projectors, were first introduced in the 1940s and they are still widely used today in a broad range of industries to verify that manufactured parts are within tolerance. These versatile instruments are easy to use and the fact…
FARO
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal of obtaining at least 5 percent of U.S. electricity needs from wind power by the year 2020. This means that the demand for “green energy,” such as wind power, is growing. One company that has taken full advantage of wind power’s exploding growth…
GKS Global Services
Litigating in the aftermath of accidents is big business in the United States today. The costs of the lawsuit system are estimated to be several billion dollars a year. With such large sums of money riding on the outcomes of lawsuits every year, tools are…
Michael Raphael
3-D digitizing technologies have been utilized in the industrial world for the last 20 years but are increasingly used in many other fields. One of the exciting, but unanticipated, uses of 3-D measurement tools has been their adoption by museums for sculpture conservation, research, and…
Jennifer Sprance
The molecular diagnostics industry is a relatively new territory that offers much promise for early disease detection and personalized patient care. When analyzing samples at the molecular level, there are serious consequences for errors, and tests must be highly accurate and precise. For example…
Konica Minolta Sensing Americas Inc.
Alfred Kärcher GmbH & Co. KG is a global leader in the field of cleaning technology. Their innovative cleaning products are manufactured in Baden-Württemberg, continuously improved, efficiently marketed and have provided the company with continuous, organic growth. Today, almost 60 years after…
