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Unilateral profile Geotol vs Legacy

I recently changed employers, and went from a 3rd party inspection company using PCDmis 2014 to a manufacturing company using the latest and greatest (2023.1 currently). At my previous employer we also only used legacy dimensions, unless datum shift was involved, and even then we only used it if the dimensions were out of spec without datum shift. I have a unilateral profile, and I'm trying to use the report to tell the machinists where they need to make their adjustments, but I'm getting some confusing max/min results when reporting using Geotol. See the photo below (I hope this is the best way to attach a photo here)

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With my deviation here only being allowed to be negative from the nominal, I'm a bit confused as to why Geotol lists a positive number for my max. Today this profile is good, but yesterday it was bad, and I was struggling with my explanation as where they needed to move. I finally just got the t values of the points that were out and used that deviation to tell them what to adjust. Can someone help me understand this? 

  • There are more eloquent people here with much fancier words... But in 2020 they changed PCDMIS to update to the new ASME spec which changed how profile measurements are expressed. 
    With the old spec it was shown as a +/-.005 result with half your tolerance above and half below, now it starts at zero and only counts "up" so 0.0 - .010 range. 

    If you are ever confused by what its telling you then go to your profile feature and turn on "CAD Graphics" and it will give you a nice little leader arrow for each point in your profile. You can use the arrows to explain to your shop monkeys what do to, basically you want to go the opposite direction of the arrow to "fix it". (only about 1/4 to 1/2 the error amount, depending on the situation)

  • Thanks  . I do use the graphics display window (after turning off all the lines besides just my arrows so I can see lol). I used that so I could see which points I needed to check the T values for. The negative T value matched my minimum value from my legacy profile dimension as expected. What I can't seem to wrap my head around is that if I'm expected to use Geotol (Or Xact, if I remember correctly), how am I supposed to get that -.0056 minimum value shown as the legacy min, and what is that positive 0.0022 max value even doing in my Geotol result. There are not supposed to be any positive T values if my profile is unilateral with 0 max material allowed. Is that value actually negative? I do understand why legacy and Geotol results aren't going to match exactly, but I would expect the max/min results to be similar, and definitely not a positive value.

  • The ASME Y14.5 method for reporting profile changed in 2018 (detailed in the Y14.5.1 2019 math standard).  This is a link to a document explaining the changes: Geometric Tolerance GD&T handout for PC-DMIS 2020R2 version (hexagonmi.com)

  • Thank you for that link  . It will be very helpful in explaining the final result calculation to our machinists. I guess I'll just stick with adding a legacy dimension below the Geotol so I can tell our operators how far they need to move, as it doesn't sound like the Geotol result is providing valuable data for manufacturing other than telling them the profile is OOT for unilateral profiles. I'll get used to working for a company that actually invests in its quality department eventually!

  • Thank you again for that link Neil. When I got some time to dig into the document a little bit further, it all finally started to come together. For that U0 profile, it shifted the nominal line to be the center of my minus tolerance, instead of reporting the deviation from the CAD model. So in this case (For U0 only), the deviation from the CAD model is actually the max value PLUS the abs(min value) in the minus direction. This definitely makes it a bit more difficult to use those numbers to communicate deviation from the model nominal to the shop floor when the tolerance is uneven, although U0 is still not bad now that I understand it a bit more. Sometimes I guess my brain just needs some time to chew on things. Anyway, thanks again, I think I finally get it.