Surface Notes

Just about every week a company contacts us saying they’re stuck with a quality problem with no clear solution. Do any of these issues sound familiar to you? • Our parts meet spec, but they’re failing in the field   • We can’ t trust our suppliers’ components, because we don’t know what they’re measuring   •

How can you control textured plastic surfaces? Samples on texture cards are a quick way to specify aesthetic surfaces, but they may not give enough information to control more functional surfaces. In this post we look at how surface texture software can help you visualize and explore textured surfaces, as well as providing parameters that

There’s a lot of science involved in pickleball equipment! We visited this topic a few months ago (digitalmetrology.com/pickleball-paddles/), and the topic continues to gain…traction.First, here’s an interesting surface from a paddle I purchased a few weeks ago:Specifically, this is a JOOLA Perseus MOD TA-15 paddle. Here it’s being measured under the Zygo ZeGage:The “peaky” surface

Have you ever used an optical microscope to look at dimensional features? It’s a fairly common task to look at lateral features such as circumferences on relatively flat components like plates, panels, and even circuit boards.Many measuring microscopes (or “optical dimensional microscopes”) also incorporate some method of optically measuring heights—and thus many systems report numbers

Here’s a common challenge: your vendors and/or customers are using different equipment to verify part quality…and their results conflict. How can you determine which system is “correct?”Here’s another common issue: you have a new measurement requirement, but you’re not sure which instrument can do the job best. Vendors give you specs, and even demos, but

In surface texture, Average Roughness (Ra) is still the most widely used parameter, even though it has serious limitations. But what other tools are there that can tell us more about our surfaces? We’ll be exploring that topic in a series of posts, so watch this spot for updates every week!Looking for more info? Check

You have a worn component…but worn by how much? Or, perhaps you have several parts that have worn differently, and you need to know why. The new Wear Analysis tool in OmniSurf3D lets you see the wear and describe it numerically, in just a few clicks. It can even handle your most complex underlying geometries.

If you’re reading this blog, you know that we love sharing what we know about surfaces. Sometimes that information impacts people’s lives in the most unexpected of places!Brian Vogel is a Scout troop leader, in addition to his 30-year career in drafting and metrology. Though he’s amassed a wealth of GD&T and surface texture experience

Here’s a fun “macro” example of an important aspect of micro surface texture.Peak curvature is a measure of the “sharpness” of the small peaks in a surface. Many papers have been written on this important tribology parameter because it relates directly to a number of surface functions. But if you’re trying to estimate peak curvature