Life Interrupts

No, seriously.  You start a new post-retirement job, buy a new house, lose a big furry companion of 13 years, the whole 9 yards.  Too busy to blog, and for that I'm sorry.  Let's see if I can fix that.  Here's one of the things that occupy my time 5 to 6 days a week, but luckily I get paid for it. 

Solidworks CAD imported into Zeiss Calypso

This big 5" x 13" hunk of steel has 45+ different callouts that need to be checked for dimensional accuracy on each and every part shipped to the customer. Nearly all of the callouts have tolerances of +/- 0.001", the industry that uses this part requires that they be held that tightly.  That's where I enter the picture - I have a massive $400K Zeiss Prismo CMM that I program to probe every feature and report the dimensions, accurate to less than one micron.  Each part is geometrically different, and some days it really keeps me on my toes, figuring out how I'm going to have the CMM find those features and theoretical intersections while reporting useful data.  I use the data as Quality Guru for trending, the CNC machine shop uses it to make adjustments, and the customer often requests it with each shipment.