9 pain points of assembling and calibrating high-precision machines

Granite squares or large straight edges are typically needed when assembling large machines. However, they are often heavy and difficult to move, requiring a gantry crane or lots of manual effort to be positioned correctly.

This time-consuming and labour-intensive process might easily lead to operator injury or artifact damage.

Consider the rails of a large gantry-type machine; checking the parallelism of two rails when there is a wide gap in between can be a challenge – if rails are not truly parallel, there will be excessive torque during axial movements, causing premature wear to the machine.

Using a dial test indicator or spirit level extended to breach the gap is prone to multiple errors.

Using traditional tools for industrial measurement requires a lot of operator experience and diligence.

The process is prone to human error in positioning a granite square, reading the dial test indicator, and aligning straight edges, which contribute to inconsistent measurement results.

Traditional measurement methods require recording data by hand. The risks of misreading data, incorrectly recording results, and difficult to read handwriting are consequently high.

It is also challenging to integrate the data effectively for both internal analysis and customer reports.

Measuring the straightness of a large machine over a distance of over 1 m is often tricky using traditional tools.

Typically, this requires taking multiple measurements of 1 to 2 m, which might cause slope errors and affects the measurement accuracy.

When installing a large machine at a customer site, machine builders often face the challenge of transporting heavy granite squares or various calibration tools.

Machine builders may have to hire or borrow equipment locally and rely on the customer's handling equipment and workforce.

Granite artifacts need to be of the right size to easily and accurately measure each axis of a machine, especially when measuring squareness using a granite square.

Traditional measurement and alignment techniques are not suitable to accurately measure machine flatness, when there is a gap in a machine plane or if the flatness of two machines needs to be compared.

The lack of versatility and dedicated machine build software for autocollimator makes conducting multi-axis measurements such as squareness and parallelism complicated and time-consuming.