Roundness and Roughness measured at once!

Roundness and Roughness - Together At Last - Designed at once, machined at once and now inspected at once.

It’s every QA Manager’s nightmare – taking the blame when manufacturing’s new, million dollar, multi-tasking machine tool sits idle waiting for first article inspection results.

Even worse, modern machines can changeover families of parts within minutes using programmed routines. More flexibility in production means bigger headaches in the lab. Where’s your bottleneck? Chances are good that surface finish is the culprit; especially on round parts where alignment of the component and operator skill are both critical.

Crankshafts are a good example. Some machines can spit out a finished part every four minutes while a skilled inspector might spend four hours or more checking finish on the main bearings, pins, journals, thrust walls and flange.

Then the crankshaft passes to another operator and another instrument for checking roundness and geometry on all those same features. While inspection may never keep pace with production, you can at least shorten the first article queue by doing a little multi-tasking of your own.

Taylor Hobson has introduced a measuring instrument that combines roughness and roundness checking into one highly efficient inspection station. Programmed routines give it the changeover flexibility of a machine tool and eliminate the need for dedicated operators. Fully automatic alignment and positioning reduces human errors and improves repeatability and reproducibility of results.