CMM Programming Good Practices

Always make sure you have a good solid alignment. Garbage alignment will lead to garbage numbers.

Absolutely! Be sure to put a lot of effort into making a good set of alignments. It is easy to get impatient and want to get into measuring features, but you got to have a good alignment or you are just wasting your time.

The most beneficial practice I have is planning. It can be rough when you are in a time crunch and bosses want to see you making progress, but I find it most important to take the time to fully review all the documents and inspection requirements for the part. Then consider the best way to fixture it. Then consider the best way to align it. On a complex part it might be hours before I have anything tangible to show for my efforts, but if I did all the planning right it goes pretty fast from there. I have seen too many people just want to jump into programming and later waste so much time fixing things, re-doing things, starting over, etc. and ultimately ending up with a program that needs to be constantly supervised by the CMM operator and doesn't give reliable results.

That being said, I'm going to contradict myself a bit and say that the best thing for a beginner is to just jump into it and try a bit of everything. Really get a feel for the software and how everything works. Try different types of alignments. See firsthand what works and what doesn't work. It gives a person a much better ability to troubleshoot.

Always make sure you have a good solid alignment. Garbage alignment will lead to garbage numbers.

Absolutely! Be sure to put a lot of effort into making a good set of alignments. It is easy to get impatient and want to get into measuring features, but you got to have a good alignment or you are just wasting your time.

The most beneficial practice I have is planning. It can be rough when you are in a time crunch and bosses want to see you making progress, but I find it most important to take the time to fully review all the documents and inspection requirements for the part. Then consider the best way to fixture it. Then consider the best way to align it. On a complex part it might be hours before I have anything tangible to show for my efforts, but if I did all the planning right it goes pretty fast from there. I have seen too many people just want to jump into programming and later waste so much time fixing things, re-doing things, starting over, etc. and ultimately ending up with a program that needs to be constantly supervised by the CMM operator and doesn't give reliable results.

That being said, I'm going to contradict myself a bit and say that the best thing for a beginner is to just jump into it and try a bit of everything. Really get a feel for the software and how everything works. Try different types of alignments. See firsthand what works and what doesn't work. It gives a person a much better ability to troubleshoot.