GOING INTO ORBIT

Rick Creveling is the president of Midwest Machining Solutions (Eastlake, OH), a precision ISO9001:2000 contract CNC and screw machining supplier whose primary business is focused on fluid systems components, industrial products and aircraft products.

Creveling notes, "In recent years we have developed our capabilities for machining tough materials like stainless steel, high-strength and temperature-sensitive alloys and duplex raw materials, typical of those used in the aerospace, aircraft and defense industries. As a result, we have expanded our customer base for these more sophisticated machined products, and along with that came the need for better and faster CMM measuring and verification capability."

Creveling elaborates on his point. "Midwest is a fairly good size

contract machining supplier with over 40 CNC machines and 19 multiple spindle automatic screw machines. We had two older Starrett CMMs that weren't giving us the capability or throughput that our business now required. We definitely needed some help in determining what our best options were, and during our evaluation process of CMM suppliers, Xspect Solutions. (Wixom, MI) gave us the most practical and cost-effective solutions."

Keith Mills, Xspect Solutions president, points out, "The Midwest Machining scenario is similar to what we find at many job shops and contract manufacturers today: older CMMs that are either manual or automatic, with obsolete software, electronics, computers and probing systems. The best solution for each customer is different and, in Midwest's case, we were able to provide some upgrading as well as new capability." He adds, "Like many customers, Midwest prefers having CMMs with granite plates . . . and so do we. Having the confidence in the thermal stability and dynamic performance of your CMM is paramount, particularly when the CMM is in a shop floor type of environment. Our recommendation to Midwest was to let us take the older manual Starrett Rapid Check II as a trade-in, upgrade the Starrett all-granite HGDC 24 x 20 x 16 with a new CNC controller and OpenDMIS? software, and provide a new economical Wenzel X-Orbit XO55, our first Wenzel machine built and shipped from our new Wenzel manufacturing facility here in Wixom."

"We recognize," Creveling says, "that CMMs today are all about software and support. We have received exactly what we needed with respect to teaching and implementing this newsoftware, which we made common on both the older Starrett and the new machine. Before we ordered the new CMM and performed the retrofit, we tested the accuracy of the machines and the inspection reports through a third party inspection service, and found both machines to be ?right on'."

The new CMM has been designed and built to with intrinsic accuracy and to exacting and rugged machine tool standards. It uses fine grain native-black granite producing thermal stability with outstanding dynamic performance, tremendous stiffness and natural vibration dampening. It utilizes the industry standard Renishaw TP20 or TP200 probing systems and offers volumetric accuracy of 2.5 microns.

The model XO55 CMM has a 3D measuring speed of 700 mm/sec with maximum acceleration of 2,000mm/sec2. The model XO 5.7.5 has a measuring range (X Y Z axes) of 500 mm x 700 mm x 500 mm.

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Xspect Solutions, Inc., 47000 Liberty Drive, Wixom, MI 48393, 248-295-4300, Fax: 248-295-4301, www.XspectSolutions.com.