Cylindricity And Roundness

I've been looking at inspecting a selction of cylinders. I'm looking to plot
the results onto solidworks 2003, but i want to put in tolerence bands so
that all the deviation off the perfect cylinder are highlighted. Anyone
know if there are programs that will show this up already and output
cylindricity and roundness values.

Thanks
Anthony

 

If not, it might be an interesting macro/add-in to do. What's unclear to me
is how the cylinders are modeled in SW. Do you have measured points ? an
imported surface or volume ? Could you send me a sample to have a look ?

Philippe Guglielmetti - www.dynabits.com

 

Anthony have you thought about the idea of creating a solid using cloud
data from your CMM, then using a "perfect" SolidWorks model either as a
go-nogo (with interference detection to a "hole") OR using the "cavity"
function to give you the difference between a perfect cylinder and your
actual cylinder OR using SolidWorks Utilities to Compare Geometry (which
will highlight differential areas)? I know these methods don't give you
DEGREES of difference (out of tolerance), and if you're trying to create
SPC tolerance data they probably aren't what you're looking for, but at
least they can allow you to accept or reject particlular cylinders. Are
you trying to do acceptance/rejection or are you trying to determine the
real results of particular processes?

'Spork'

 

Such programs do exist. I saw one at the NPE recently, I believe it was
called Shape-Grabber. They sell both the hardware and the software. There
are others as well. You might want to look at ScanWorks from Perceptron,
Direct Dimension, or Polyworks Inspector, all of which were in a recent
issue ot Time-Compression Technologies magazine.

Jerry Steiger