I'm about to start working on a program for a plate and it only has 2 tooling balls that I believe the manufacturer uses for alignment. I have never used tooling balls for alignment before, but I have seen and read that you usually need 3 tooling balls to make a proper iterative alignment.
My question is: would these 2 balls be enough for such an alignment? Or am I missing another element that can be used as a third element for the alignment?
Also, the manufacturer's report doesn't show any element with 0 deviation, meaning (according to me) that there's not an element set as the origin of the coordinate system. Is this correct?
3 minimum. It is the old 6 degrees of freedom thing. You could use 2 balls if you combine with something else like a plane, a point, etc but not by themselves, unless you make some assumptions and incorporate the machine coordinate system for example
3 minimum. It is the old 6 degrees of freedom thing. You could use 2 balls if you combine with something else like a plane, a point, etc but not by themselves, unless you make some assumptions and incorporate the machine coordinate system for example