Surface Notes

measure a chipped or worn cutting tool

Assessing a chipped or worn tool corner

As you may have seen in this video, analyzing a wear scar on your surface is fast and easy with OmniSurf3D… even when the scar occurs along a curved surface. However, what you may not know is that the OmniSurf3D wear analysis tool can also handle worn or  chipped corners as well. For example, let’s

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gar strip,microfinish comparator gage,surface roughness,surface texture,Digital Metrology

New! Microfinish comparator gage textures in the Surface Library

We made a big addition to the Surface Library this week! The new Microfinish Comparator series includes high resolution, 3D data of the 22 surface texture samples on a GAR S-22 microfinish comparator gage. These textures represent various machining operations and surface roughness amplitudes. Many of us use these kinds of tactile gages to compare

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surface texture analysis shape removal tools with omnisurf3d. ourtesy of Asist. Prof. Alp Eren Şahin and Prof. Dr. Tamer Sınmazçelik from the Mechanical Engineering Department of Kocaeli University in Kocaeli, Turkey.

How to remove shape from a complex surface

To measure surface texture accurately we need to be able to separate it from the underlying shape. Most surface texture software can remove simple shapes such as tilt and cylinder. Complex surface shape, however, can prove difficult to handle in a lot of software. OmniSurf3D includes a number of flexible tools to handle complex shape.

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Surface Texture and Performance - Brag Lagman QMP Racing - Digital Metrology Solutions

Engine performance? It’s in the surface texture.

QMP Racing’s Brad Lagman tells us how. There’s information about your performance and machining processes hiding in your surface texture. But you need to be able to see it to improve it. No one knows this better than Brad Lagman, founder of QMP Racing Engines in Chatsworth, California. Lagman has been building engines for drag

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Rz Surface Roughness Measurement Parameter not equal to Sz Surface Texture Parameter - Digital Metrology

Is Rz equal to Sz?

Some 2D (profile) parameters are closely related to their 3D (areal) equivalents. For example, Ra and Sa (2D and 3D average roughness), and  Rq and Sq (2D and 3D root mean square roughness) are calculated in similar manners and often produce similar values. Rz, another commonly used 2D parameter, however, does not generally correlate with

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Surface Texture Data - Surface Library Digital Metrology

Surface Library: free-to-use surface texture data

Our new Surface Library is a collection of data that will help you to explore, understand, and explain surface texture. It contains some of the more useful and interesting data we’ve collected over the years. Some datasets highlight common surfaces. Others help show how a particular analysis affect data. And some are…well, just fun.

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Strip chart readout - Digital Metrology Solutions

Creating a world-class digital workflow

For years labs and factories have been attempting to go paperless, eliminating hard copy documents in favor of digital storage. The benefits are compelling, from an environmental perspective as well as for data accessibility. In many cases, however, “paperless” simply means storing documents as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files or as bitmap images—exchanging one static format

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zonal flatness measurement - Digital Metrology Solutions

Zonal flatness in OmniSurf3D

Controlling flatness is critical for many surfaces. Functions such as sealing and load distribution are directly related to surface flatness. While controlling overall flatness is important, it may only be part of the answer. A gasket sealing with a head deck, for example, may tolerate a large amount of overall flatness variation…yet it may still

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Removing Form from a spherical surface with nodules - Digital Metrologyigtal_metrology

What’s really “beyond Ra”?

Years ago just about every discussion about surface roughness began with Average Roughness, Ra, one of the oldest and most widely known texture parameters. More and more, however, when I start working with people, they begin by telling me that they know Ra is not all it’s cracked up to be. Many articles have been

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