Anybody out there use spacelok or gridlok on a romer arm? I'm buying a new arm and would like some feedback on the pros and cons of either system from somebody who's used them.
We use Gridlok quite a bit. It's great for large items that require the arm to be moved to complete the program, without the annoyance of spheres or cones used for leapfrog.
Just hold the tip in the cup until you hear the beep and repeat 2 more times.
It is more accurate than leapfrog, but as with the nature of movement, there is still an amount of error induced.
Spacelok, Gridlok and ToolLok are basically the same idea, just rendered on different scales.
Here's a quick overview of the three:
Gridlok places the "lock-in" points on the floor, thus it's the only system that is "installed"-- which requires you to have a specific place you use it. You can still use the arm anywhere else, but you only get the benefit of GridLok if you can put your part in the area where the gridlok points are.
SpaceLok is the pyramid setup that you can use anywhere, but you're basically limited to being within reach of one of the sides of the pyramid, so your volume is restricted, but you don't accumulate the leapfrog error.
ToolLok is the three-point lock-in method but it's mainly used as a shortcut for things like fixtures or repetitive setups-- you can set it up so it recognizes the 3 points you touched and then do something like recall an alignment or load a CAD file or part program. We have a demo of this where a single fixture can be touched 2 different ways and it automatically knows which one of 2 different parts is on it.
We have the Gridlok and it seems to work quite nicely. The accuracy loss seems to be very minimal. Just make sure your gridlok is big enough to cover any parts you need to measure.
