At the Grede Foundries plant in Reedsburg, WI, the two coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) working side by side in the quality lab extract 3-D data from castings in very different ways. The Brown & Sharpe Excel 7-10-7 from Hexagon Metrology (North Kingstown, RI) makes basic prismatic measurements with conventional PH10 touch probes supplied by Renishaw Inc. (Hoffman Estates, IL). And the other CMM, a Brown & Sharpe Validator, scans complex free-form surfaces with an LC50 laser scanner from Metris North America Inc. (Rochester Hills, MI).
Because the scanner can collect 19,200 points per second and easily generate a million points for each part, Grede had to buy another software package, Metris' Focus Inspection, to process the data. The conventional CMM software that the plant had been using before retrofitting the scanner to the Validator simply could not handle the volume generated. Consequently, Grede Foundries became one of a growing number of manufacturers learning that two worlds of software have emerged for managing and using 3-D inspection data.