If you don’t have your machine right to start with, then it’s hard to say that you’re going to have parts that will be in your acceptable range afterward.Factories always calibrate all the gauges to measure all of the products after they come off the machine, but how often do they actually measure the machine that made it?

That could actually be a shortcut to some of these problems:

by making the machine right to begin with.

When we think how to improve the production process, it would always important to start the machine performance measurement and diagnosis. And employing the right calibration system from the start could save considerable time and money down the line.

Laser Interferometer would be The (Fast) Workhorse when selecting the right calibration system. 

(Above photo is using a laser interferometer to calibrate CMM machine.)

Less expensive, more portable, and more widely used, calibration lasers have been around for more than three decades in the market and are more appropriate for dealing with individual errors.

In comparison to the multi-axis calibrators, Laser system is more of a magnifying glass or a target tool.

For people who want to get on and off the machine quickly and get information fast, to find out whether things have changed and also to identify errors they’re unable to measure any other way. It’d the one you’re going to use to go back down and fix the errors mechanically, or use for particular application, like looking at dynamic measurements. And since the Laser Interferometer like Chotest SJ6000 can take 50,000 points per second, you can get that information at a higher rate and then look at it in detail, down to a nanometer.

Another reason why calibration laser systems remain so popular is versatility. For example, the laser system works on machine tools and CMMs. It’s used in laboratories and nuclear power plants as a length standard. It’s used to measure the flatness of surface plates and the squareness of extremely long machines, such as 90-foot gantries.

It can measure dual-axis drive machines, where you can put one laser on one side and another on the other side, and measure both drives at the same time. Normal Calibrator will see that as a yaw, but the Laser interferometer will actually give the linear positioning for each side, so you can apply compensation and correct it.

For this reason, it is often used on extremely large bridge mills.

And in the case of a standards lab—for nuclear power plants, for instance—they need traceability for all of the standards in-house; and in order to do that, they also need to have a laser interferometer. 

Speed is another factor. After all, every second that you’re on a machine and measuring it, you’re not inspecting a part. 

With the laser system, you can go into the part program of the machine tool and trigger the laser at one-microsecond intervals. In other words, the machine can actually tell the laser when to take a point. So, there’s ways to speed up even the individual degrees of freedom.