When customers call, engineers at Roush Industries (Livonia, MI) must often hit the road. Roush, a contract engineering firm that primarily serves the automotive industry, is frequently called upon for tasks involving structural analysis on new automobile designs, as well as for reverse engineering projects--often performed at the customer's plant.
Roush engineers used to rely on manual techniques to make all of the exacting measurements re-quired to perform these jobs. But with the advent of increasingly sophisticated touch probe, laser scanning and digitizing technologies, the task today has become much faster and easier. Moreover, taking this advanced technique directly into an auto factory and to component suppliers' sites, or literally "on the road," is easily possible with portable coordinate measuring machines (CMMs).