A few years’ ago I met with one of our customers who supply quality services for many companies, covering a wide range of products. For many of their applications, an indexable probe head, for example, was sufficient to get the job done. But in some cases they needed more inspection flexibility, say equipping their coordinate measuring machine (CMM) with a heavy duty probe head that could support longer extensions.
Traditionally, it took some time and the assistance of a service team to change a probe head. The customer in this case didn’t need to change probe heads particularly quickly, but this traditional approach that plagues many a quality team was not an option. However, the customer’s budget couldn’t justify buying an automated probe head changer.
Such a scenario and tension between budgeting and needing inspection flexibility might sound familiar to you. It’s situations like these that set me and my colleagues to developing a solution. And so Manual Application Changer (MAC) was born.
MAC enables quick changes of probe heads in a few simple manual steps. Users can simply swap between indexable probe heads and the high precision fixed HP-S-X5 probe head.
As well as increasing inspection flexibility, MAC is about enhancing quality teams’ inspection versatility in the long term. For example, companies that produce parts for third parties in various markets often need to tackle new or changing parts; these parts might set inspection challenges they can’t meet with their current probe head equipment. MAC offers a cost-effective way to meet these needs as they arise and to ensure organisations are ready for changing application needs in future.
We know cost-effective probe head changing is a common problem, so we made MAC as user-friendly and as open to adoption as possible. It can be installed as special on a wide range of existing Hexagon and non-branded CMMs.
Visit the MAC product page to learn more and see what CMMs are compatible.
