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How long does it take you to program?

Lukas Frey

Let’s say someone gives you a metal part with 150 dimensions. How long would it take you to study the print, figure out fixturing, create a setup sheet, and program it? You’ve never seen this part before and it’s somewhat complex. Assume the print makes complete sense to you after studying the print—so you don’t need to ask the designer any questions.

Also, would the program run perfectly the first time? If not, how long would “proving out” the program (making adjustments) take you?

I ask these questions because I get them a lot being the only programmer at a significantly large company with 3 machines. I’m curious what other people’s experiences are, and I’m open to any tips. I will state my answers to these questions in one week. Hopefully I get a lot of responses.

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  • 0

    I used to do quoting for a 3rd party metrology lab. We would always assign 2 minutes per dimension (regardless of if a feature could be used for multiple dimensions) for our quote. Unless there were complex dimensions that we noticed ahead of time. So for this theoretical part for setup, program and proving out the program I would say about 6 hours. And honestly using this method tends to be pretty spot on most of the time..... usually I would be done an hour or two before my quoted time. The extra time was used during any problem solving and data review.

    Now run time is a different story..... That's the one thing I always sucked at calculating. Depending on if its a PPAP or a capability study it could be days of running non stop.

  • 0 in reply to cheesiechanman

    Wow, that's not much time. A 150 dimension probably would take me a minimum of a full 8 hour shift. And then another few hours to prove out the program (run it through, watch all the hit points, and take some manual measurements to verify accuracy as needed). However, sometimes I have other tasks at work and people inturruputing me.

  • 0 in reply to Lukas Frey

    I recently had to program a part that is less than 36" long, less than 3" wide, and less than 1" thick.  Customer (who is clueless) had ballooned up a print with the 'required' dimensions (which was 75% basic dimensions, so that was WRONG WRONG WRONG!) and ended up with 2,313 dimensions (yes, over 2 thousand dimensions on the report).  Takes my Global 3.5 hours to run and it makes a 200 page report.  Took 48 hours to program and prove out (as well as make MY Excel report file).  1.25 minutes per dimension.

  • 0 in reply to Matthew D. Hoedeman

    We do Excel FAI reports too, which is a real pain. I am using Excel Form Report now. But there is some formatting I have to do, like adding all the GD&T characters to the nominal values to make the FAI report look presentable. Like, instead of true position having a nominal of 0, I manually enter in |TP|.005|A|B|C|.

  • 0 in reply to Lukas Frey

    my excel form is a 100% custom creation and it is graphical & textual.  I makes a 'pretty picture' for people that can't (or won't) understand numbers.  I makes a textual summary, it makes a raw data report, and it makes a Pcdmis-type report as well.  The graphical looks like this:

    Yes, it can take some time to set up.  Screen captures from Pcdmis showing the points (dots), then you have to drag the markup cells to where they 'fit' then add leader lines.  Yes, takes a bit of time, but once you check the parts, it takes less than 2 minutes to have a report printing out, and there is no way for someone to 'mis-understand' what is good or bad anywhere on the part.  The borders of the cells turn RED when they are OOT

  • 0 in reply to Matthew D. Hoedeman

    Interesting. Maybe I should consider something like this. Because, engineering is constantly changing balloon numbers. They refuse to manually balloon the prints, so sometimes all the balloon numbers change at a small rev update. With something like this, I suppose I could leave out balloon numbers (since the reader knows where the dimensions are located).

  • 0 in reply to Lukas Frey

    my 'master' Excel file is all 'set up' and ready for pictures & data to be put in.  It can handle UP TO:

    270 SPC features

    600 surface features

    480 trim features

    80 hole LOCATION (not position) features

    80 slot LOCATION (not position) features

    120 hole POSITION featues

    80 slot POSITION features

    480 'linear' dimension features

    It is in a 'constant' updating process and is currently over 144MB in size.

    Once it is copied and filled in a for a job, all the extra (un-used) stuff gets deleted and some stuff gets moved from tab to tab so all I have to do it copy & paste the data from a DatapageRT data report into it and then print it.

    Quite a bit of the time spent on that 'stupid' job was taking that master file and making the 'linear' section 6 times as big to hold their data.

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  • 0 in reply to Lukas Frey

    my 'master' Excel file is all 'set up' and ready for pictures & data to be put in.  It can handle UP TO:

    270 SPC features

    600 surface features

    480 trim features

    80 hole LOCATION (not position) features

    80 slot LOCATION (not position) features

    120 hole POSITION featues

    80 slot POSITION features

    480 'linear' dimension features

    It is in a 'constant' updating process and is currently over 144MB in size.

    Once it is copied and filled in a for a job, all the extra (un-used) stuff gets deleted and some stuff gets moved from tab to tab so all I have to do it copy & paste the data from a DatapageRT data report into it and then print it.

    Quite a bit of the time spent on that 'stupid' job was taking that master file and making the 'linear' section 6 times as big to hold their data.

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