Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the Smart Technology: Time is Money Webinar. My name is Blain Mead and I'm the CEO of Master Gage & Tool Company. We're a leading gaging, inspection equipment, and specialty tooling distributor.
Our company is offering these virtual seminars opportunities as an innovative extension of our solution-based business model. We encourage you to engage with us throughout the webinar. If you have any questions, please type into the chat and our speakers will answer during the Q&A at the end. This webinar will teach you about breakthrough technologies and how to utilize these solutions to improve your bottom line. I want to thank New Scale Robotics, Marposs, Mitutoyo, Renishaw, and Werth Inc. for participating in this kick off event.
I'd like to start off with our keynote speaker. He’s been with New Scale since 2016 and helped launch New Scale Robotics in 2018. He’s developed partnerships with Universal Robot Robots, gaging manufacturers, helping their customers integrate automated dimensional gaging. Please welcome Stefan Friedrich. Hi everyone. I'm Stefan from New Scale Robotics.
Excited to be here and kick off the webinar today to discuss how to incrementally automate directional gaging. Thanks to the team at Master Gage & Tool for inviting me to present today. So we're a system certified systems integrator for the collaborative robot company Universal Robots, and we focus on automating, park handling and inspection applications. All right. So today I'll show you how to how industrial robots can be applied to automate inspection processes, whether it's in the metrology lab or automating manual gaging on the production floor.
And we'll cover some best practices on how to apply them to higher mix, small batch applications. And go through how to cost, justify and create a business case for automation, which is definitely different than a cost justification for just buying inspection tools or different metrology equipment. So automation is becoming more accessible to small and medium sized manufacturers, letting everyday employees use these new technologies to automate repetitive processes, usually with robots working side by side with people, often without guarding or barriers, which is a new change. And one of the core technologies that's enabled this agile or flexible automation are collaborative robots, which are often called cobots. And today collaborative robots are the fastest growing industrial robot segment.
So collaborative robots do what any industrial robot does. They automate repetitive and boring tasks, but they're different in a few key ways. So the first key difference is that the interface is easy to use and takes more of an app based approach to automation.
So any new commands that you teach the robot are done right through the tablet that controls the robot, which is called the teach conduct. It's about the size of an iPad. And I actually think Apple is a good comparison here. So Universal Robots has a platform that lets third party companies like New Scale Robotics develop hardware and software to interface to their robots, which is pretty similar to Apple's App Store.
So UR will test and certify these third party products as a UR plus product. And then it goes into their UR plus app store and there's hundreds of different UR plus certified tools, grippers, welding kits, sanding and polishing products, deep learning tools and of course, quality control technologies that we'll be talking about today. And with these powerful third party apps and UR’s easy to use interface, most people can have the robot completing simple tasks with just 20 minutes of hands on time, and a robot fundamentals training course only takes two days. And that's really all most people need to learn how to teach the robot new processes.
The robot interface has been designed to be usable by everyday employees, and you really don't need to be an engineer or programmer to use these types of robots successfully. So here's just a basic example of a robot working side by side with people. This is completing a food packaging process, and you'll notice that the robots have no guarding and operate well within reach of the worker. And that's really the second key difference with collaborative robots, their force and speed limited.
So they are typically able to operate around people without guarding after a safety assessment. So cobots support higher mix applications because you don't need to dedicate the robot to one task and one task only all day long. So in general, agile automation targets total volumes, total volumes in tens of thousands per month.
And this really allows manufacturers to automate at roughly the same speed as a person, take up about the same amount of space that a person needs to perform the task while improving the repeatability of the process and gaining all the other advantages that you normally get from automating a process. So automating something like inspection will free operators or inspectors to do more productive tasks that are better suited for people than a robot while working side by side with the robot. So with agile automation, robots can be deployed by your in-house team and take up much less time and money to implement.
If you follow the appropriate steps of incrementally automating a production process. And using this method, you can typically to deploy a project in three months or less, rather than the normal schedule of 12 months or more. So, you know, not having to go all in at once has really made automation more accessible for smaller manufacturers and allows for that lower total investment that helps you get a faster payback for each cell. And I have some costs, general ballpark costs listed there.
So we're seeing many manufacturers, especially small businesses, being forced into either considering automation for the first time, or they've had to accelerate their plans to automate production because they just can't keep up with current production levels, with the existing processes and equipment and that often creates a quality bottleneck, or they just can't find enough people to produce and inspect the parts that they make due to the labor crisis in manufacturing. And historically, since, there haven't been great ways for smaller firms to keep up with the large investments that bigger companies have made in automation, it's made it hard for them to scale their business and be more productive in a way that they can compete with those larger manufacturers. But these new automation technologies are starting to help smaller businesses fill that gap and keep up by reducing barriers to entry and addressing higher mix, low volume production. So we found that quality applications have generally lagged behind other more production focused robotics applications. Things like machine tending, packaging, welding, and finishing applications tend to get a lot of the love and in the manufacturing space. And it's it's really because they're more production focused and focused on getting parts out the door.
But we're starting to see a more widespread demand for robots and quality departments, and it's mostly due to the growing labor challenge forcing them to automate. So, you know. The. question comes up, “Where do you start?” So the first thing to look for when deploying a robot for a QC application is really where your team spends the most time on manual processes. And that's a that's a general rule of thumb for any automation application. We find that collaborative robot systems that can fill in the hours of one full time equivalent 40 hours per week, roughly gives people an acceptable payback and return on investment that can justify that use of the robot. But, you know, if you're running especially, you're running two shifts, 80 hours or more is ideal and obviously will generate an even faster payback in ROI.
So that's a really good target if you're running two shifts per day in your production facility. So I'm going to play a video here, just load up in a second. So we find that, you know, the best candidates for automation aren't the hardest possible QC processes, but they're things that are simple and time consuming. So, you know, depending on the complexity, it may be worth automating. If you just spend 5 hours per week on a particular sorry video is not loading up.
If you spend 5 hours per week or more on a particular inspection task. So if you have just eight types of parts to be inspected each at 5 hours per week, that's one full time equivalent employee at 40 hours per week. And you know, depending on the application and setup changeover with a collaborative robot from one task to another may only take a few minutes with minimal changes needed.
So this video here where we're just showing New Scales QSpan workstation is an example. So this this uses a collaborative robot we have it equipped with robotic calipers that also function as grippers. So the robotic caliper can measure parts with an accuracy of about plus or minus five microns or minus two tenths and it's about two times better than most digital calipers, with a micrometer being slightly more accurate. So it lets you do, you know, basic material handling of picking and placing parts, but also lets you measure the dimensions of the part when you grip it, allowing you to automate handling, dimensional gaging and data logging with one tool. So the type of tasks that we'll be showing on screen in the second is the basic concept I've been talking about.
So you'll see it as the system rolls in. In the video here, we're automating gaging at roughly the same speed as a person taking up the same amount of space. A person needs to manually inspect parts of the bench while improving the measurement, repeatability and data collection.
So this frees that operator to, you know, or machinist or inspector to do, you know, more productive tasks that are really better suited for a person than a robot and are more complex. So, you know, calipers, of course, are not the only tools for gaging parts. So in this example, we've got a gripper caliper picking up the part from a known location inside of a conveyor. We load it on a border gage to measure the ID, bring it under a drop gage to measure the height, and then the robotic caliper measures the outside diameter. So all three gages we have tied into the universal robot with an easy to use interface to teach the system new inspection routines and record all the measurement data to a separate PC. So just as the video showed, we really break down automation automated gaging into three steps pick, measure, place.
So we pick parts from a known location. We measure the features of the specified gage and record all that measurement data, and then we place the parts into a pass fail location. You can also sort parts based on size. We're working on an application right now where we have to sort sort parts in a in a very small, you know, micron range separation into over 50 different sized categories. So just kind of an alternative way if you don't want to just do simple pass fail.
So when we think about ideal QC tasks to get started with, it's really the same as any automation project. We want to focus on those simple, time consuming tasks, so approaching automation one step at a time is really important, especially if you're just getting started. I really love this summary from Joe Campbell about incremental automation. So he says if you have a ten step manufacturing process, you don't have to automate all ten steps to be successful, identify one process step worthy of automation, implement it, and start generating the ROI very quickly. So this approach helps you divide the big goal, which may be lights out production into smaller, more manageable projects and expenses and really reduces the risk of the project, reduces schedule and scope creep.
And it gives you a much bunch of small successes that your team can work off of and build off project after project while giving you that positive return and payback on those smaller investments as you work through them. So another good benchmark I heard from Robotiq is ask whether or not you can complete the task wearing a mitten, you know, just two points of contact. So it's a really good way to differentiate more easily automatable tasks from something that's more challenging and better suited for the dexterity of a person's hand. Another really important tip from our experience is the--you need to have a robot champion at your organization that's trained on how to use the robot, take ownership of those projects internally and really requirements to vendors, provide internal troubleshooting support and help your team stay on schedule and identify future automation projects. Selecting the appropriate gage is also important and we recommend you first try automating with your existing gaging methods.
So for example, if you use a manual digital caliper today, use a robotic caliper to make the same measurement. Or if you're using a bore gage, try using the bore gage. When you do this, it really expedites that the validation and correlation studies that you're going to have to do and completely changing the methodologies. Methodologies for part measurement will extend the project and development time and understanding the part features you're measuring is important. We need to understand that we can achieve a sufficient gage R&R generally, you know, with a goal of of less than 10%. So we'll go into some video application examples here.
The first application I'm going to show here is from Orchid Orthopedics, and it was a deployment that we did for them. So this customer decided to automate the inspection of drills. They make surgical drills, so the parts start as raw bar stock and then are cut down to size. Adding features of diameters and couplers that they need to inspect.
So we're picking drills from the pallet one at a time. We measure critical features with a precision pneumatic drop gage, and then the parts are sorted into pass fail bins, and then the data is exported into a computer in a basic ASCII format for use in their final inspection forms. So their goal was to replace the repetitive measurements that their operators were doing manually with micrometers, and a critical requirement was to remove that operator or two operator variability that they were seeing from inspectors using those manual gages and hand tools. The robot effectively acts as a single operator, so that was that was pretty easy to achieve. And Orchid was able to deploy this system for a family of part numbers to support higher mix, lower volume inspection.
So using the cobot, they're able to have their operators trained on the system and repurpose and reprogram the system for a bunch of different part numbers. So using similar fixturing, similar part trays and programing templates to speed up that part-to-part programing really helped. And once a program is validated for use in production, the operator just simply needs to come over, load a tray, hit play on the program, and then they can walk away and go do something else. So non-contact caging methods have a lot of benefits, including speed, accuracy and digital connectivity.
It's a fast growing segment, but usually still requires staff to load and unload these systems, which is labor that you have to factor in is overhead in the operation. So they can be a little bit more complex to automate depending on the technology and application video on the left shows something I would consider a little more complex with a camera mounted on the end of a robot arm that's going in to check electrical connectors on this assembly, make sure they're locked in position. Video on the top right shows a drill being loaded and unloaded from a laser micrometer to do a basic o.d measurement. And the final video on the bottom right shows how cobot can automate air gage measurements. And generally, these air gages require loading and unloading the pre tight clearance.
So just showing how an older type of technology can be can be automated and digitally connected. So these are some hybrid applications that I'm showing now. Show contact and non-contact techniques.
Top left video. We have cobot picking apart from a tray. It loads it on a bore gage that's seated within a laser micrometer so they can do the inside diameter and outside diameter in one shot. And then the bottom right video shows CMM machine tending.
We're finding a lot of overuse and over commitment to CMMs that, you know, a lot of the time aren't exactly necessary, but they have the tool in the shop and they want to use it because it's available and very high accuracy. But for repetitive measurements, you know, there's a big opportunity cost for dedicating a lot of stuff to your CMM unnecessarily as one. You know, one example, we had a CMM programmer that said their their lab had over a one and a half month long backlog on their CMM, which is just totally unacceptable. This is another application showing some of the more, you know, kind of less tangible benefits of automation. They use a robotic caliper, verified that parts produced in tolerance so their machinist doesn't have to.
So if the part drifts outside the acceptable tolerance window, the process stops and a machinist can come over and service the lathe adjusting an offset or replacing a cutting tool, and that can significantly cut down on scrap and rework rates and give you more reliable data to let you do preventative maintenance and doing this sort of inspections. Really critical. If your goal is to automate and have fully lights out production that continuously produces good parts, you know, intended the QC functions of the machine.
If you want to get much more complex with it, you can also get to fully lights out production by feeding the inspection data back to your CNC machine and setting automatic offsets, which is is an interesting new feature. Companies like Karen Engineering have some good software packages for that. Payback and return on investment are definitely important metrics for any capital purchase. Recommend heading over to this link at automate.org if you're interested in doing some sample calculations for any any applications you're targeting, you know, usually ROI and payback are are really the number one motivators for an automation project.
And you know, it's an important note here, you know, even though we're talking about labor savings and it's it's really the biggest motivator for any of these CapEx projects. We have not put anyone out of a job with our robot, any of our robots that we've deployed. So I know that's kind of a scary thing for for some people that are not used to deploying automation, but, you know, those labor savings are beneficial to the business and they're often being applied to places where you don't have enough people anyway. Here are some of the benefits kind of beyond a simple ROI calculation.
You know, they're better gage R&R, better process control, better yields, more engaged production team because they're doing less repetitive and boring things. But really, these are much you know, they're nice, but they're much harder to quantify, but especially when you're thinking about narrow analysis. But nonetheless, they're they're definitely worth considering as you evaluate an application. So just to wrap up a couple of key takeaways. As you tackle automation, think about approaching it incrementally.
To start, you don't have to go all in at once. There's there are ways to manage that, you know, in smaller chunks. And, you know, companies like us or other automation providers can certainly help advise you on the best way to do that. You know, automation is becoming more accessible and, you know, I encourage everyone to give collaborative robots a try.
There's a bunch of different ways to get your hands on on a robot. So there's there's a virtual simulator that Universal Robots offers called the UR Academy that can give you a good feel for the interface and show you how easy it is to use. So I'd encourage you to send machinists or inspectors to go look at those things and try it out themselves. And there's there's plenty of regional training centers throughout the country that can also give you direct hands on time with the robot.
All right. Thank you. Thanks, Stefan. Good stuff. Yeah, great technology! To answer questions real quick, the webinar is being recorded, so you will have access to that. So that was a question on the chat. Our next presenter has ten years of experience with with Marposs Corporation in engineering and manufacturing and he manages the non-contact products including laser mics and optical equipment.
Please welcome Eduardo Bolivar. Hello, good morning. My name is Eduardo Bolivar.
I’ve been at Marposs for ten years and a product specialist for non-contact products. We're going to talk a little bit about the Handy Wire Scanner and also about the Marposs in general what we are and the Aeroel company. They are a laser micrometer company.
So Marposs, the headquarter of Marposs is in Bologna, Italy, the plant. There are two buildings actually. The head office in the United States is here in Auburn Hills.
Marposs it's it has a was a worldwide company and is present in 34 countries. It has 80 offices around the world. And one Marposs normally exports 95% of the product from from Italy. And there are 3,700 people around the world and they the last in the last 26 years.
22 years, Marposs acquired 26 companies or is 26 companies? These are companies for laser test, company for laser micrometers, company for confocal confocal technology and different companies that help to fill a gap that Marposs doesn't cover at the beginning. Now we cover a lot of gaps. We normally don't don't cover before.
Marposs, 80% percent of the revenue always is invested in a new R&D. New developments in what which markets Marposs are is in an automotive automotive, aerospace, cooling, EB. Now the EB is coming in very strong.
The IT, the airleak, medical stuff, and glass glass market. Now, let's talk a little bit about Aeroel. Aeroel is one of what one of those 26 companies that joined Marposs in five years ago. Aeroel is a is dedicated for a laser micrometer, a technology or for LED.
Some of those are the LED, but for non-contact diameter. This company is been in Marposs. It's been on the market for 42 years. It was founded in 1978, but is in the market for four. I mean, selling the unit, the same unit for 42 years.
What that means, that means the laser is very accurate. It doesn't have any any problems with accuracy. Any problems with applicability it been proven in a different environment.
Why? Because it's always the same laser is always the same technology but is being renovate with with time. What this- what this can I can say okay how you know it's always the same? Also, you'll see old? No. Marposs or Aeroel it's been been is been involved from 1980 to now and now the gage is the same gage but in different applications as we can see here in the pictures here, we have our grinding, grinding application and then here we have a bench application and here we have like a tubing application or wide application. So but always use the same technology in the laser. We have a dual axis laser or we have a single, single axis laser where we are in what which markets, we are more pressing. We are more pressing than the mechanical industry, wire and cable industry, plastic industry and the biomedical industry.
Talking about wire. The wire in the wire industry is huge, but where we are more focused is in the drawn wire industry. This kind of technology, it can be difficult to measure. Why?
Because in this kind of technology, in this kind of environment, you have a harsh environment and is if you have something like this, a dusty, dusty environment, the cameras can be or the lenses can be always there. And always going to be a problem because you don't have a good applicability because you don't have a good accuracy, because you will have a dirty problem all the time. So what Marposs invent is here we have a cleaning device. It’s a patented cleaning device to measure or to clean the the wire before goes into the laser. And then this one is an automatic or is always is a blow in a station that is always blowing, always cleaning the lenses. So this this patent allows to the gage to always work and work really good in this kind of environment.
Then the other one you see here, this is something to get the part or the tubing. This is a transparent tubing that is passing through the gage. This allows to be always in the middle. But it doesn't matter if we have a vibration. If we have vibration, doesn’t it matter because the laser the laser has in all the measuring field we have plus minus point five microns.
The difference. So it doesn't matter if the if the cable or the part or or the tubing is exactly in the middle or is in the top or is in the bottom, if it’s doing this, it’s in effect, because we have the linearity that we have in the gage is is very good. Now, let's talk a little bit about the Handy Wire Scanner. What is the Handy Wire Scanner? It is an innovative, handheld optical instrument for measuring non-contact diameters in moving wires like this showing the picture. This is coming to fill a gap in the measurement that it was before. For example, in the first, and I mean right now how the people is measuring is is taking the spool and take one one side of the spool and then measure with a micrometer or what it was already is the online measurement is like I were talking about after the draw in the draw operation.
Then we hold, we have the gage, we have the cleaning device and measuring on line, but we can measure while the wire is running. We can measure with the with the with the hand, with the Handy Wire Scanner and we can get we can avoid any issues that at the end we have this whole spool with that, but with a bad diameter. Why? Because we cannot measure in between.
Okay. So we can go there, check. It is good. Go to the other spool. Okay. It's good. Right? Then I will show you a video about how is this artifact working? And this for on the shop floor. Okay, here we can see the video and these one, these are the rails.
They tell you the the the guide guidewire so that we can we can align the wire and is accurate. There is still vibrating really and it doesn't affect that the the measurement as you can see, you go there, you check it, it’s moving and then make the calculation and take the take the measure. Go to this spool, in each spool, you can go there and check. What they are doing besides the micrometer is how they are measuring is normally they cut a bit of the wire or in the on the scale and then the weight times the scale and what the scale is doing so they can calculate the diameter with the feet and with the weight.
Now these this handy wire is coming to help. You can see can measure transporting products or can measure a non transported product. So you can ask and say okay, but how you will be sure the the the the wire is not going to be like this or like this. Right. With an inclination. So Aeroel has patented system to compensate that misalignment. So, it develop an LED and CCD technology.
How this works it has two crosses or linear sensor to automatically compensate the positioning errors. So if you have something like that, so okay, he's not going to measure, right? He's not going to be within the measuring field. But if you have a misalignment within the measuring field, the the compensate the compensate for that misalignment is going to be done. Okay. What about the the performance? We can do what we can do on the with the unit on the and talking about capability studies.
This has a measuring field of ten millimeters but can measure from point one up to six millimeters. If we have the rollers, the guide rollers like we saw on the video, it can measure 8 millimeters, up to 8 millimeters because we know exactly the wire is going to be always in the middle. The repeatability is one micron, the accuracy is two microns. You normally say plus minus one micron is totally two microns. What is the battery life? The battery life working normally with no Wi-Fi is 4 hours. The battery life is with Wi-Fi is 3 hours.
Then after that time you go there, you connect the the the unit to your computer or connected to a plug and then charging and you have you ready to use it again. The weight is not even a kilogram. You can have it. You can put it in your backpack and your bag in your pocket, or you can use some other device to to haul the gage. How you can collect the data? The data can be collected directly through the cable or can be collected in a through Wi-Fi in real time.
Okay. These, and let's say it’s a holder. But this holder is not only a holder, it has also here tag and this tag can be read by the gage.
The gage can read the tag and then you can download the information and you can tell them, you know what I mean? This line in this line, you know, is it has this tag. So okay, you go there this the line number one is these measurement at this time. So what do the line number two and you will have another holder with a different tag and you're going to say this is now number two, number three, number four. And you can measure or you can read the information in line with this gage separating by a by the tag. So you can segregate every, every, every line with these different tags.
What accessories do we have? So we have the holder, we have another tag that can be used always when you go to a different place. This is a hand protector. This has wire guide wire. This is another holder and another holder with a tag and this is they use a plug to connect to the computer, to connect them to the the outlet. So any questions, any comments? Please let me know. My name is Eduardo Bolivar.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Eduardo. Thank you. It's great technology. I've done with that gun a couple of times and it's worked fantastic. So yeah, the handouts as stated in the in the chat room are available.
So with any information you can click on that and get that. Move on to our next presenter. Our next presenter is has been a CMM sales engineer for over 20 years. in metrology experience. He manages the sales and support of Mitutoyo CMM product line in the Southeast. And please welcome George Gosnell.
Thank you, Blain. Welcome everyone to the Smart Technology: Time is Money webinar. As Blain said, my name is George Gosnell with Mitutoyo America. I am the product manager for the CMM product line in the southeastern United States. Today we're going to talk about the MiStar 555 shop floor coordinate measuring machine. But I wanted to start this off as Mitutoyo is not just mics and calipers.
We have a full line of CMMs. We just happen to have an exact line that we have made for shop floor situations and dirtier automation and for environments. So I have an infographic here that kind of shows a lot of the ways where our shop floor series of CMMs and our MeasurLink SBC data collection software can fit in among a factory in some forms of automation. And I'm going to play a video here. Mitutoyo is revolutionizing precision measurement on the shop floor, helping manufacturers to save time, reduce scrap, and save money.
Time is money and Mitutoyo metrology solutions save both by offering a complete range of in-line and near line coordinate measuring machines, innovative software and custom metrology solutions. Mitutoyo CMMs including the MiStar 555, MACH Ko-Ga-Me, The MACH 3A, and the MACH V deliver optimal in-line measurement, performance, flexibility, versatility, and high speed precision measurements on shop of every size. This suite of CMMs offer lab measurement accuracy on the shop floor for faster, more efficient quality control around the clock with minimal maintenance. Able to load in line manually or robotically, Mitutoyo CMMs increase part measurement throughput without sacrificing accuracy, while reducing the time spent traveling to and from the CMM and manufacturing machines.
Mitutoyo MCAT planners CMS software enables one click automatic measurement programs generated from 3D CAD models and product and manufacturing information to increase measurement throughput. MCAT planner can reduce programing time by up to 95%, which helps keep your production line running, while ensuring precise part measurements and quality control. The Mitutoyo M Cosmos CMM software provide 3D CAD model programing, scanning, gear measurement, and airfoil measurement capabilities to speed up development and product process. M Cosmos allows for integration among a whole series of applications, improving CMM efficiency and delivering greater quality control. productivity.
The software allows users to tailor their measuring software to include only the specific modules needed to meet requirements, making the measurement process much faster. Mitutoyo MeasurLink SBC software not only speeds up inline part quality assurance, but it serves as a great tool for reducing scrap to keep money, the bank and not on the shop floor. MeasurLink collects and analyzes measurement data in real time and alerts operators of trends, cycles and non conformance as soon as they occur. So you can stop the manufacturing process sooner to adjust tooling, reprogram the part or any other correction that needs to take place. The software's user interface allows a user nearly infinite ways to view information specific to a process from any connected device, helping to keep manufacturing within your chosen tolerances in real time. Let's look at Mitutoyo’s inline CMMs with more detail.
The MiStar 555 CNC CMM offers our complete suite of best in class shop floor measurement solutions, delivering fast, accurate inline measurements for a full range of work piece applications. MiStar provides unprecedented versatility and the toughest shop floor operating condition capabilities with best in class speed and acceleration. Get the most accurate measurements regardless of dust, oil and coolants with guaranteed accuracy for the widest temperature range of 50 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit on a shop floor CMM. An easy loading design with three open sides, saves inspection time by allowing robotic loading and unloading, as well as effortless walk up inspection both in line and near line and with Mitutoyo’s Smart Measuring System. The MiStar 555 offers real time remote monitoring capabilities to perform quality control from anywhere with a connected device. An absolute for today's smart factory needs.
The extremely compact MACH Ko-Ga-Me automated CMM is ideal for single-feature inspection in automated cells or as a stand alone solution. Its three axis CNC measuring head, high speed drive and flexible design make precision measurement more efficient for small components. The lightweight MACH Ko-Ga-Me delivers CMM capabilities with maximum space flexibility. Install the MACH Ko-Ga-Me on your production line, near line, or directly onto a rigid frame machine tool.
This allows for high speed measurement and quicker feedback and compensation in traditional and smart factory manufacturing processes. The MACH 3 ACNC coordinate measuring system is the world's fastest horizontal axis CMM, providing exceptional in-line near line accuracy assurance along its extended y axis. Even for large machined components, its easy to use touchscreen interface and all in one construction streamline and enhance each measurement. The MACH 3 ACMM delivers increased drive speed, acceleration, and measurement speed to achieve higher throughput in a smaller footprint while maintaining highly accurate results. It's all-in-one space saving design, along with excellent dust resistance and temperature compensation, makes this CMM ideal for inline operations where a reduction in measurement time is required.
The high throughput MACH V CNC CMM uses a flexible measurement system to achieve a drive speed of 866 millimeters per second, making it the fastest inline vertical axis CNC CMM on the market. The MOC B CMM machine delivers rapid, highly accurate measurements of machine components directly within or near your production line. Its brine centric drive system provides high speed and maximum accuracy at lower costs and is engineered for 24 hour operation with protection against harsh environments.
High speed linear guides used in place of compressed air means less maintenance problems occurring. The MACH B space-saving design, high acceleration, and high speed probe movement makes shop floor quality assurance fast, simple and reliable. From detecting dimensional defects in part blanks to inspecting the fine line with incredible accuracy.
You can trust the end-to-end shop floor measurement solutions from Mitutoyo. Okay, so that took us through all of the MACH series, but I'm going to drill down a little bit further into the MiStar and show a few extended slides. And as Blain is pointed out, under the handout section, there is a handout on the MiStar. There's other information available for the other things if you're interested.
And just contact Master Gage & Tool and Mitutoyo. We will be happy to meet with you and talk about that. So the first thing on the design and accuracy, as you heard said, we have the largest operating temperature swing from 50 -104 degrees and still maintaining about 3.8 microns on a on a linear scale accuracy. We move on to talk about the simple compact footprint of the size of the machine.
It really doesn't have a compressed air line fitting. It really just runs off of the standard 120 volt, which means it could be moved around from project to project. It means it could also be reprogramed in the place of hard gaging you could move something like this in place and use it for small periods of time. There are different types of probe heads available.
There's a fully articulating probe head, a fixed head. We can do contact scanning and we can do touch probe measurements. The integrated probe bracket built into the machine actually does not take up the usable measuring volume of the 500. There's actually another 70 millimeters in X that lets the probe not, you know, take up your 500 millimeters and measuring X.
You can see the computer and the controller are all mounted inside the the one piece unit and the interface comes with a touchscreen monitor and we can hook it up with our quick launch software, which could be pictures or barcodes or any kind of instructional views for an operator to walk up to and interact with. It runs to the same remote manager that the software runs. If it were to be run by a robot, we're just using a graphical interface for operators like she covered over the open legs on three sides of the computer monitor can be mounted on any of the four corners of the machine or on three of the four corners of the machine. The cantilever design lets you put the robot approaching from the side, from the back. You do not have to wait for the bridge to be necessarily all the way back and hold position temperature compensation on each axis. There is also a work piece, temperature sensors, and there's also a ambient air temperature sensor and moisture sensor to constantly monitor, monitor the environment of the park and the machine as a whole.
And you can even put in different coefficients of expansion if you're measuring material materials like aluminum in a hot environment, you would want to allow for that. The scale technology that allowed the shop floor seems to to exist. The middle, Mitutoyo made a great step forward in the absolute scale technology that is on this series of machines. It has actually moved its way into our regular line of CMMs because there they didn't lose accuracy.
We gained some ability to see through some dust and debris and clutter that used to give us a huge problem for high accuracy glass scales in the shop floor environment. Here are some of the specifications on the measuring range the accuracy that can be achieved in the different temperature volumes, the resolution of the scales and things like that, and the linear bearings. with no compressed air. A little bit about the MeasurLink software. So MeasurLink, that she was talking about in the video, is a SPC data dashboard that everything that Mitutoyo makes and anything else that someone has with the data output or the ability to put out a comma separated variable file or a text file, we can read those measurement data in and we can graphically portray them to calculate your CPK, your process capability.
So like in a normal operation, let's say you had around this machine and you're measuring parts of one at a time and you're sending the raw data over to MeasurLink and it will track every time you make part number ABC and you did the ten millimeter board dimension on the inside. These are this is around the results and it will chart them for a long term data storage. Another thing you could do is you could have a lot of things in your office or in your manufacturing floor using, MeasurLink and you could be passing from MeasurLink QIF format to an ERP cloud that other things could take that actionable data and do things with it. Sometimes in the other cases, there are even machine tools that can take the QIF data or can take direct MeasurLink data depending on the type of the controller and what type of machine tool you're using.
And the machine tool can make actionable adjustments based off of the part inspection raw data from the CMM. These are all pictures of how we tie together to make a smart measuring system. The SMS technology we use the statistical data control where MeasurLink ties everything together and we use the operation status of the status monitor, the controller in the MiStar CMM allows for easy integration in robots, easy integration into a shop monitoring system, some kind of scoreboard or plant lifecycle maintenance systems.
So it is ready to talk to and give more information than simply pass or fail. It will give information as to how long it's been running. You know, what is the internal heat? And some of the controllers do a lot of good information is there for predictive analytics. So some of the biggest deliverables, the broadest temperature range, the space saving design, the wide selection of probes. We have a 32% higher acceleration than the competition, 15% higher drive speeds.
We have real time temperature compensation. Each axis apart, sensors were fully enclosed controllers, full bellows, the new scales with 45% more detectable area. Two types of joysticks, ergonomic design, and the quick launcher software and a palletize part loading system. So some of those are some of the key points that make the MiStar 555 standout.
And then we do have a special solutions group that does help in integration projects, even down to simple barcode scanners and or RFID tags. And these are just a couple of pictures of some examples of that. And with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Blain. Thanks, George. Great fast and accurate technology for the shop floor. Good stuff.
Our next presenter has over 35 years Precision Measurement Industrial Sales Experience. He's the Southeast Regional Sales Manager for Renishaw, specializing in modular fixturing and fixture plates. Please welcome Doug Emery. Hello and good morning. Welcome to the Smart Technology Webinar: Time is Money, and thanks to Master Gage & Tool for inviting me to participate. My discussion today is going to be focused on saving time and money via modular fixturing.
And what I'll go through is some applications, the purpose of the fixturing, some examples, and the payback, the benefits from the various fixture products. A little background on Renishaw. Most people in the audience, I'm sure, have heard and seen the Renishaw name. It was founded in 1973 by David McMurray and John Deere. Different John Deere than the guy that came up with the green tractors and the product that launched Renishaw was the invention of the 3D touch probe and the application was actually for the famous Concord, the high speed aircraft.
And that invention revolutionized the 3D measurement industry and jump started coordinate measuring machines. Currently Renishaw is based in the UK, has 81 locations in 36 countries. My particular product expertise is in the fixturing but as you know, Renishaw also manufactures probes, probe heads, modules and encoders and a number of other other products. Getting a little bit into applications, the primary applications that we see with modular fixturing or CMM, they make up the bulk of our our business in the fixture group and for example, we've manufactured many, many plates for the Mitutoyo MiStar CMM that George just highlighted in his presentation. We also manufacture and offer products for vision systems, for articulating arms and other applications for example, surface measurement and scanning applications.
The primary function of the fixturing is in most fixturing-- most measurement applications, you have the need to position, secure, elevate or orient the part so that it can be measured properly. And that's what our modular fixtures do. The basis of the base typically is going to be a a grid plate for CMS. It's typically an aluminum grid plate with a series of all threaded holes that the fixture components can be applied to.
And again, to elevate secure position and orient the parts. Here's a couple of examples of parts of being fixtures for a CMM application. Some of the products that we offer are the aluminum base plates. We also have a unique system called the Quick Load Rail System. The Quick Load Rail is a steel rail that can be mounted on the CMM in minutes. There are standard plates available in quarter 20 and metric sizes that dock to the rail via a locating notch and some magnets.
And so you can in minutes set up a grid pattern for your modular fixturing on any CMM regardless of size. And you can you can also dock the rails in tandem to get more surface area. If you have a larger machine the application for vision are slightly different in that we typically will use an acrylic clear acrylic plate with a grid pattern of threaded holes. The acrylic plates allow the bottom lighting, which is typically used on vision systems to come through the plate.
And that way you can get the profile measurements as well as the surface finished, the surface illuminated components. Nowadays, many of the vision systems also incorporate touch probes, so you have both types of measurement touch in camera on the vision systems. Our unique modular system, the QuickLoad Corner, is similar to the quick load rail system for CMMs.
The quick load corners allow you to dock an acrylic plate into a corner and repeat the location of your fixture setups from one, one application to another to go along with the the base plates, whether they be a aluminum or acrylic. We also offer a full line of fixture components, including standoffs in many different thread sizes and diameters and heights, tension clamps, rusting cones, vises, the holding devices and pusher clamps. There are numerous, numerous gadgets available to get your cart in the correct position, and there's a great deal of efficiency in that. These are simple to use, they’re quick to assemble and and not expensive off- the-shelf type items. Here's a picture of the QuickLoad Rail system.
You can see there are some standard size plates that dock to the quick load rail and you can dock plates to either side of the rail. Create the size of the grid that you want to create on your CMM. CMM base plates can be manufactured in any size in many applications. The end user wants to cover the full measuring range of the machine. So for example, on a on a Mitutoyo Crysta Apex 710 CMM, we will supply a 28 inch by 40 inch plate in quarter 20 or similar in M6 or M8. That would cover the entire entire measuring range in some cases, there's either tooling or a probe rack on the machine, and we will accommodate that by modifying the size of the plate or locating the plate away from any fixturing or probe racks that are on the machine.
As far as the acrylic plates go, there are numerous products available in standard sizes and we offer these in a multihold design, which is mostly threaded holes. We also offer multi-window designs which incorporate a clear window on the acrylic plate to allow parts may be sitting flat on the plate to be anchored, yet not interrupted by the threaded holes and the acrylic plates come in a number of standard sizes, but also can be made in custom sizes. As far as the fixture components go, any component can be purchased individually. We do offer a number of kits for both vision and CMM applications. If you're working with steel parts, we also offer kits that incorporate magnetic components for the vision systems.
We have the quick load corner systems. These corners will mount permanently to your machine and the plates are and can be docked in and out of the machine for machines that have devices or some sort of tooling. For example, a rotary chuck mounted on the left side. We also make these for right handed mount applications and we do manufacture these for a number of different OEMs, including Mitutoyo. The benefits of using modular fixturing as you can reduce the setup time for inspection applications.
And we have many customers that will purchase a a plate, set it up and leave the setup intact for high volume parts. And we have systems like the QuickLoad Corners and QuickLoad Rails to repeat the location of those setups. Repeatable and accurate results. The fact that you've secured the parts and they are always being held in the same position and orientation for producers is repeatable and very accurate results. You can also reproduce your fixtures set up.
There's a number of ways you can do that. One is on the grid plates. They they are typically numbered and lettered on the rows of threaded threaded holes. And so you can document your set ups.
We also offer a fixture builder software, where fixture builder software has a library of every component Renishaw Fixturing manufacturers. And you can in every thread size and you can import a CAD model of your part into the fixture builder software. You can import the plate, you are using. And if it's not a standard size plate, you can construct the plate the size that you intend on using and build your fixture in fixture builder.
Save the setup and it'll actually document all the components that you've used in that setup. For multiple parts setups where you're using CNC programing to do rows and columns of, multiple parts. You can also secure those parts and set them up identically in rows and columns when you have the multiple park type setups. And that's it for the fixturing segment. And here's some contact information and feel free to contact Master Gage & Tool, either the Greenville Office or Danville Office.
I'm locally based in the Southeast and I have lots of demonstration equipment and I very often do on-site visits to look at your fixture applications. Thanks, Doug. Appreciate your time and a great quality product you have. Thank you, Blain. Our last presenter is National Sales Manager for Werth Inc., which offers
German engineered precision measurement systems at the highest quality. His career spans several industries, including medical device, aerospace, defense and education. Please welcome David Caprio. Thanks, Blain. Good morning, everybody. So I'm here today to talk about the Werth TomoScope XS Line for CT and x-ray machines.
So to give you a little bit of background here, Werth was actually produced the first ever TomoScope S back in 2005 and this was the first machine ever used CT x-ray as a metrology device for for 3D evaluation and analysis. So we literally invented the technology to do this and we have some of the best technology on the market today. And I'm going to tell you why. This is a great tool to save time and really to give, you know, four dimensional analysis and give you a great return on investment. So just a little bit of background here in the U.S. we have over 150 machines installed.
We are headquartered in Giessen, Germany, which is about an hour north of Frankfurt. And so we've been here in the U.S. here since the early 2000. And this is the installation base we've accumulated in that time.
So we do have a full line of CT x -ray machines that cover a wide range of measuring ranges for different sized parts materials. You'll see here, these measuring ranges are in millimeters and in inches for the length and diameter of the of the measuring range of each system. The line that I'm going to be focused on here and the machine I'm going to focus on here is the TomoScope XS Plus. So I mentioned in 2005, we had the TomoScope S first. That was the first machine on the market to to use CT as a metrology device. 2017 saw the launch of the XS machine, which afforded this technology in a small footprint at high resolution and really fast measuring times.
And then two years later, in 2019, we launched the TomoScope XS Plus, and that expanded the measuring range of the XS line and gave that same smaller footprint with, with the fast measuring range, excuse me, fast scanning times and measurement capabilities. So a couple of things to keep in mind when considering which machine would best fit your application. So we first have the kilovolts for the tube, for the X-ray tube itself.
So ranges from 130 KV and our product line up to 450 KV. And that's going to do more of your, you know, really dense material. So it's all determining on the material, your part and then the size of it. So our XS line operates at the 160, 160 and now 200 the options for tubes.
So you can see here the different materials and the penetration lengths in each material. So you can see here plastic parts much easier to penetrate. You can put larger plastic parts, smaller metal, steel, ceramic parts depending on. And again, the cavity that you have here and we have some examples of different parts at the different key levels.
So the other component to the to the CT machine is not only just your your kilovolts, but it's going to be on your focal spot size. So the smaller the focal spot size that you produce, the higher the resolution. And the thing with focal spot size is that you're limited by the amount of wattage that you can use to produce that focal spot size. Wattage has tremendous influence and is the factor to determine how fast that your scan is.
So there are two meter tubes offered in X-ray machines. Reflection tubes, so you see here on the left that the energy is generated and then bounced off a tungsten target out through the detector. And then we have transmission tubes which are penetrate directly through the tungsten target, the transmission to is a real excellent feature of our machines and we offer these and anywhere from 160 KV up to 300 KV machines. And what this allows is for really high resolution scans and very fast measurements compared to reflection tubes.
So if we take the example of a ten micron focal spot size that you wanted to produce at a pretty high resolution. With a reflection tube would be limited to ten watts of power with the transmission tube, you are actually allowed to use up to 50 watts of power, which means that it's five times faster than than the traditional reflection tubes that we see on the market. So most of our machines have these transmission tubes, so that allows for a much faster scan times. And then even at the higher resolution, most of our competitors top out at 50 Micron excuse me, 50 watts, we actually can get up to 80 watts for focal spot sizes of 16 microns. And so again, almost twice as fast as the next leading technology on the market.
And you can see here, you know, it's a comparison scan of a reflection tube in a transmission tube. On the left here, you can see pretty good scan quality here if you want to measure these things on the left here. But if you really want to dig in and maybe see that feature that's on the ridge there with the reflection tube really struggles to get really high quality resolution. And the transmission tube offers that. So again, the XS plus is a tremendous machine. This gives some diameters in terms of the diameters and lengths of the parts that we can measure.
The MPE machine is four and a half microns, which is also one of the best on the market. We offer it in 200 KV, 160, and 130. Again, max power up to 80 watts. To give you a little background how C.T.
works, we're taking a bunch of 2D image stacks and we're creating a 3D voxel volume. So we're taking a bunch of images and creating this voxel volume. This is basically taking the radiographic images, creating a point cloud from the grayscale values produced in the x ray. And then we create an SDL from there to allow us to go ahead and take our measurements on on the part, so you can start measuring directly on your part.
We also have options to do color coded deviation plots. If you want to compare this to a CAD model or you can do an actual actual comparison to a nominal of your choosing at different features along the part you to see here. This is our field of view. That means we're just putting the parts in here in front of the detector.
You'll notice there's multiple parts in here and we'll stand it doesn't take very long with these plastic parts and we have the SDL here that we can begin manufacturing. So really quick, simple loading the parts in there, really easy picturing and putting it right in front of the factory to get those CAD right. So getting back to the presentation here, we have some additional scanning options as well. And so one of these is you saw in the video there, field of view scanning. We also offer raster tomography, which allows you to do higher magnification scans of your parts. So similar to, you know, a flashlight against a wall.
And the closer you move your part to the A tube source here in this case, in my example, the flashlight, the larger the projection is on the detector, which allows for a higher magnification of your scan in higher resolution. And with raster tomography, you can act
2022-11-24