Thursday, February 17, 2011

Linear Scales, Time For An Upgrade

Today I would like to share an article that was recently published about a linear scale retrofit that we performed at Votaw Precision Technologies in Santa Fe Springs, CA. Votaw Precision Technologies has been making Critical parts for the aerospace industry for 45 years. It has grown from a startup in the owner’s garage to a 240,000‐square‐foot facility, employing 130 people. Votaw’s VMC is a five‐axis milling contouring machine, employed to serve a wide range of aerospace and industrial customers in the machining of flight components. When purchased, its main measurement feedback system consisted of rotary encoders on the ball screws. After they started using this VMC, it began to have problems holding tolerances. We installed linear scales on all three axes and after the upgrade retrofit was complete, our laser calibrations showed success. The cyclic error had completely disappeared and overall, where the accuracy had been ±0.0005 on the three axes, it had now dropped down to ±0.0002. That is an increase of 150% in accuracy.

Click Here to download the full article

Craig D’Ambrosio
General Manager
A Tech Authority, Inc.
www.atechauthority.com
craig@atechauthority.com
(909) 614-4518