Page 14 - MetalForming May 2011

Tech Update
CMM Glides into Air-Bearing Manufacturing
Professional Instruments (PI),
a Hopkins, MN, manufacturer of air-bearing spindles and slides, recently was subcontracted to manufacture critical parts for the
Mars rover. To ensure its meas- urements (using a bore gauge,
gauge blocks and Mikrokator)
were on track, the firm partnered
with one if its suppliers, Andrew
Tool, which used its coordinate- measuring machine (CMM), a
Zeiss Accura, to check its key
parts. Soon after, PI went in search of its own CMM, to allow
it to, inhouse, measure critical air- bearing diameters. Holes are
sized down to 0.25 microns to
match shaft diameters, held to the
same precision, on a line of air-bearing spindles. A CMM also was needed to measure tapers on a new hydrostatic bearing being developed. Tests per-
formed at nearby Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology in Maple Grove, MN, showed that the standard deviation with a Zeiss CMM for a 1.5-in.-dia. hole was approx-
imately three times better than the firm’s previous meas- urement methods.
Following the tests in 2009 the firm purchased a Carl Zeiss Contura G2 direkt CMM, boasting a maximum meas- uring rate of 150 points/sec. and a maximum sensor exten- sion of 100 mm. “This was the perfect system for our unique hole-sizing application, and at an affordable price,” says PI vice president Dave Arneson. The CMM measures the spin- dle hole size after grinding and typically measures 50 to 100 parts/day. Hole sizes are fed into a proprietary program
that matches the shaft to a correspon- ding hole to achieve the required flying height for the spindle.
“For our 38-mm-dia. measurements,
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