I had great trainers at both, but a negative for Hexagon was the 11 students to three machines ratio, compared to the Zeiss distributor's four students sharing four machines
and two offline seats. Every possible minute of the training I had for the Zeiss was hands-on, so I was able to learn more by doing than spending the better part of the week trying to retain PowerPoint slide content.
We've used most of our training credits from CMM purchases to bring a Hexagon AE in-house, and each time we nominated no more than four employees to be trained and dedicated two of our lab CMMs for their exclusive use. The result is training that is specific to
our parts, using
our machines, covering techniques specific to
our needs, and including more hands-on time than they could get at the local Hexagon showroom.
I used Apogee XG on the fly back in 1998 no training.
We also purchased QC 5000 for another Starrett CMM during that time, no training.
5 Years of guessing and hard gage testing led me to leave that company for a PC-DMIS / CAD driven company.
I did take the CAD++ and Advanced lessons from Hexagon but it wasn't until I purchased my own seat of PC-DMIS 3.7MR2 CAD++ offline that I really started to make some real headway.
Not to mention using this forum on a regular basis to understand how to think correctly.
Currently I use everything from 3.7MR2 PRO to 2015 CAD++ off line from my home in Washington to support the Virginia based company along with all U.S. vendors and China and UK vendors who need PC-DMIS programming.
I do have a back ground in manual/CNC machining along with CNC programming but that was only 5 years of my total manufacturing experience.
One more thing.
My best training has come from engineers, machinists and QA Directors challenging the CMM results my programs have produced. These type of challenges have helped me learn and gain a great deal of confidence in my abilities, the software, and the CMM's we use. I have also been proven wrong once or twice but I prefer not talking about that.
Are you by any chance overloaded with offline work?
One more thing. My best training has come from engineers, machinists and QA Directors challenging the CMM results my programs have produced. These type of challenges have helped me learn and gain a great deal of confidence in my abilities, the software, and the CMM's we use. I have also been proven wrong once or twice but I prefer not talking about that.
I am going to take my Level 3 Advanced training course in November! I am trying to decide what to take next.
Have you taken a training class since they stopped giving out printed training books?
I took the level 3 class about 2 years ago and was shocked that they only had an online digital 'workbook' that had almost no capability to make notes and didn't even let you save the few notations it allowed.
I offered them some helpful suggestions about how to make it better,
- they offered the book AFTER the class for $100, I suggested they offer it before the class
- to improve note taking capability and ability to save notations
etc. I wonder if they implemented any of my suggestions. I've decided I'm taking no more such classes until its improved.
I had great trainers at both, but a negative for Hexagon was the 11 students to three machines ratio, compared to the Zeiss distributor's four students sharing four machines and two offline seats. Every possible minute of the training I had for the Zeiss was hands-on, so I was able to learn more by doing than spending the better part of the week trying to retain PowerPoint slide content.
We've used most of our training credits from CMM purchases to bring a Hexagon AE in-house, and each time we nominated no more than four employees to be trained and dedicated two of our lab CMMs for their exclusive use. The result is training that is specific to our parts, using our machines, covering techniques specific to our needs, and including more hands-on time than they could get at the local Hexagon showroom.
11 to 3? That sounds about right for Hexagon. (well, unless 'remainder' students got split into fractions) We had 3 pupils on 1 machine, and it was basically a struggle to see who was Gilligan, who was Skipper, who was professor and how soon we would shipwreck our 'Minnow'...........
