Comparison process

Comparative measurement and thermal stability

Equator’s innovative and highly repeatable gauging technology is based on the traditional comparison of production parts to a reference master part. Re-mastering is as swift as measuring a production part and immediately compensates for any change in the thermal conditions of a shop-floor environment. Equator can be used in factories with wide temperature variation – simply re-master and the system is ‘re-zeroed’, ready for repeatable comparison to the master.

Traceability to calibrated CMMs

Master parts do not need to be expensive custom parts like a traditional gauge; take a production part and measure it on a co-ordinate measuring machine (CMM) to establish feature variation from CAD or drawing nominals. The results from any CMM, operating with any CMM programming software, can be configured to be used directly within the Equator software.

Effectively, the calibrated absolute accuracy of the CMM (often located in remote temperature controlled rooms to ensure accuracy) can be ‘extended’ onto the shop floor to provide calibrated traceability to Equator measurements. With the calibration file loaded into the Equator software, measurements made in the Equator system can be referred back to the CAD or drawing nominals. This allows true process control with SPC packages.

‘Master’ part comparison

A known good part, or 'master' part, is scanned to generate a master data set. The same scanning routine is applied to each of your production parts. Each production data set is compared to the master data set to determine whether the associated part is within user defined tolerances.

‘Part nominal’ comparison

Determining the nominal size of your production parts is also possible. Simply measure the master part on a CMM to create a calibration data set to normalise your subsequent comparisons. Now the true deviations from part nominal can be displayed for each part.