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New Aviation company Coming to town

bw_bob
There will be a new aviation company coming to town & I know they will have B&S machines with Blade software. My question is how much different is blade to the demon. Any help would be greatly appriciated.........
  • Please take this info with a grain of salt, as I just finished 2 days of Blade training at B&S in Huntersville, NC yesterday. While I already had the Blade softwares on my cmm, I would not have been able to run it without the "extras" I was giving during my one-on-one training, even if I knew how. While Blade and PCDMIS go together, they are also very separate from each other. The alignment and scanning is done with PCDMIS, but all the dimensioning, tolerancing, airfoil best-fit methodology, etc. is done outside of PCDMIS. IMHO, training is 100% required. You could probably teach yourself how to do it, but without the "extras", and knowing which methodologies (there are a few of them) meets your B/P and specs, I don't see how you could satisfy your customers requirements. Good luck (to both of us).
  • Thanks for the reply Pat...I would not even consider trying to train myself. I was just trying to get an idea how much difference....Do you use the demon & do you think you will like using blade.....
  • I've worked in aerospace and Industrial Gas Turbine (IGT) layout/cmm for 15+ years, working with customers like Pratt & Whitney, GE, Honeywell, Siemens, Westinghouse. I've only been using PCDMIS for 5 months, but have 10 years on Sheffield MeasureMax. I've used a few airfoil softwares in the past, mostly in-house (outhouse really) created stuff that would work OK, but not really satisfy the customers B/P (spec) methodology.
    With Blade, I liked what I saw a lot. You get the accuracy and repeatability of the cmm, with a fast, user friendly analisys software (that has the major customers' methodologies built in). Plus the operator interface (not sure if that the correct term) is simple too, in case you have separate programmers and operators. You could possibly program in PCDMIS to do what Blade is doing, but why write code when you can just check off a parameter in Blade (over simplified of course). I've scanned a couple of simple airfoil sections and produced some profiles to datums in PCDMIS (without Blade), but many B/Ps allow for displacement and twist prior to checking profile (the B/P I had was simply profile to existing datums, no twist, no displacement). Blade can handle that. But I have no idea how to program something like that in PCDMIS, or any software for that matter. IMHO, if you're going to inspect airfoils, use Blade. Especially if your customer is already uses it. Hope this helps.
  • MODERATOR EDIT it looks like #2# posted in the wrong thread.
  • MODERATOR EDIT it looks like #2# posted in the wrong thread.


    Tell me about it....That MODERATOR EDIT NO SWEARING PLEASE BOB scumbag hijacked my thread....and with a better topic then mine.
  • Tell me about it....That MODERATOR EDIT NO SWEARING PLEASE BOB scumbag hijacked my thread....and with a better topic then mine.

    It appears to be a gang-bang of sorts there bob... a real twofer. Word must be getting around about how easy you are.
  • Thanks for the reply Pat...I would not even consider trying to train myself. I was just trying to get an idea how much difference....Do you use the demon & do you think you will like using blade.....

    To add to Pat's info:

    PC-DMIS Blade is a 3-part system:
    A) PC-DMIS (preferably 2015.1 or 2016!) with Blade option enabled on license to unlock special blade-only scanning and raw data exporting functions.
    B) Blade software that takes the raw data, performs quite a lot of algorithm crunching, and delivers a full report.
    C) Blade Runner software - a "front-end" simple operator interface that you setup to give the operators drop-down options to pick which blade to run so that it launches PC-DMIS to run the program, then launches Blade to crunch the results.

    So you begin in PC-DMIS: your write a program to align the blade then perform an operation to extract nominal section data from the CAD file of the blade.
    Then you add special Bladescan commands that use the nominal data to drive the probe to go scan those sections.
    Then you add a command at the end of the program to export the raw data to a certain folder.
    Then you do all kinds of fun special operations in Blade to setup the tolerancing. You end up with a bunch of special files with the same name but different extensions to keep track of.
    The final step is writing a simple text file that drives Blade Runner to do it's thing.

    The worst part is deciphering the blade blueprint and translating that to the cryptic abbreviations in Blade that stand for certain esoteric aerofoil dimensions like chord angle, leading edge thickness, etc - then customizing how they are calculated according t the blade designer's whimsy. That can get tricky.


  • To add to Pat's info:

    PC-DMIS Blade is a 3-part system:
    A) PC-DMIS (preferably 2015.1 or 2016!) with Blade option enabled on license to unlock special blade-only scanning and raw data exporting functions.
    B) Blade software that takes the raw data, performs quite a lot of algorithm crunching, and delivers a full report.
    C) Blade Runner software - a "front-end" simple operator interface that you setup to give the operators drop-down options to pick which blade to run so that it launches PC-DMIS to run the program, then launches Blade to crunch the results.

    So you begin in PC-DMIS: your write a program to align the blade then perform an operation to extract nominal section data from the CAD file of the blade.
    Then you add special Bladescan commands that use the nominal data to drive the probe to go scan those sections.
    Then you add a command at the end of the program to export the raw data to a certain folder.
    Then you do all kinds of fun special operations in Blade to setup the tolerancing. You end up with a bunch of special files with the same name but different extensions to keep track of.
    The final step is writing a simple text file that drives Blade Runner to do it's thing.

    The worst part is deciphering the blade blueprint and translating that to the cryptic abbreviations in Blade that stand for certain esoteric aerofoil dimensions like chord angle, leading edge thickness, etc - then customizing how they are calculated according t the blade designer's whimsy. That can get tricky.

    Eight years on. . . something make you miss good ole Bw-Bob today Josh, or were you just really bored and decided to see if you catch clueless with a resurection?

    Rolling eyes
  • Rest in peace bw. You will never be forgotten.
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