New Aviation company Coming to town

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.

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.