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What Was Your Mentally Exhausting Program??

The reason I ask is because of the program I am working on right now. I have 3 fixtures with 4 parts that I have been working on. All of them have complicated Datums / Poor design. The fixture that holds two parts is the most complex of course. The gage is the only one built to hold the part vertically. It has a hole in the back of the gage to probe the bottom of the part through. So the part sits with the rear surface in the CMM's +x direction. The part sits on the net pads for datum A about 120mm from the back surface of the gage (where the hole is) There are 18 small clips spaced around the outside edge of the part that I need to touch in the -x direction. This means I need to articulate my probe to, at times, an angle of A-115B35. This shortens the distance from the end of the probe to the Z axis column. Most of the time I am less than 2mm from crashing into the gage.

The part also only has one tiny slot to control rotation on one side of the part. So when placing the part on the gage it can rock, roll and slide everywhere. So that means I need to create local alignments on each clip to ensure that they hit correctly which means dancing around that almost crashing point the entire time. And I need to create alignment after alignment to ensure that I am hitting it correctly and then be sure that I recall a fixture alignment before proceeding because if I forget to revert back to the fixture and the next part changes in size/ location/ rotation by a mm or 2 I am guaranteed to crash. And this doesn't include the complexity of some of the dimensions and the callouts. For example a profile without datums with a unequal tolerance called out..... or a position on a single plane.....

So with all that being said I have been programming these parts for a couple weeks now and my head at the end of the day is just mush. That's where the Forum comes in. So I want to thank all of you for giving me a source of relief from my mental torture chamber over here.

Also, What are you more exhausting program memories. What is that one job that really kicked your butt?


Parents
  • We made this one part close to 10 years ago for a big aerospace company. I was still working part-time and going to college full-time. It wasn't a very big part, maybe 12" X 12" X 4" or so... but it had a ridiculous amount of features in it. The print was like 12 pages long, with over 800 dimensions, and it went all the way up to datum BE or something (through the alphabet twice). This was before we had Discus so I had to create an old school bubble print and by hand with a pen and a washer and manually create the AS9102 FAIR, and it ended up being almost 100 pages long. The program was so big, that if I had to edit something, after pressing F9, it took literally a minute to open the AutoFeature window (my computer at the time wasn't all that powerful either). It got to the point that I just cut sections of code out and pasted them into a "new" program so I could edit it, and then I would paste it back in to the actual program once the edits were complete.
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  • We made this one part close to 10 years ago for a big aerospace company. I was still working part-time and going to college full-time. It wasn't a very big part, maybe 12" X 12" X 4" or so... but it had a ridiculous amount of features in it. The print was like 12 pages long, with over 800 dimensions, and it went all the way up to datum BE or something (through the alphabet twice). This was before we had Discus so I had to create an old school bubble print and by hand with a pen and a washer and manually create the AS9102 FAIR, and it ended up being almost 100 pages long. The program was so big, that if I had to edit something, after pressing F9, it took literally a minute to open the AutoFeature window (my computer at the time wasn't all that powerful either). It got to the point that I just cut sections of code out and pasted them into a "new" program so I could edit it, and then I would paste it back in to the actual program once the edits were complete.
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