The part is finished. It is still on the table. And now someone has to find out whether it is right.
In a lot of shops that means breaking setup, carrying the part to a CMM that is booked solid, waiting, and then discovering that something moved. If it did, the fixture is gone, the offsets are gone, and the only honest option is to start again.
The cost of that is not machining time. It is the gap between finishing a part and knowing something about it, and in a mold shop running long cycles on expensive stock, the gap is where the money goes.
Probing closes the gap by measuring on the machine, while the part is still located. The reason more shops do not do it is rarely that they object to the idea. It is that the probing cycles live in a different place from the CAM they program in, and nobody has had time to work out where.
Fusion's inspection capability is built to assess parts before, during and after machining, using both CNC probing and manual measurement. The operations are specific rather than general purpose.
Inspection results can be imported from machine-generated files or taken from a live machine connection, analysed for tolerance conformance, and turned into an inspection report. Measurements taken by hand with calipers, micrometers or height gauges can be recorded in the same place.
A PowerMill shop has usually spent years building up strategies, and quite reasonably does not want them touched. Nothing here asks for that.
The division is clean. PowerMill continues to do what it is good at, which is the roughing and finishing of difficult geometry. Fusion handles the probing cycles and the inspection record. The programmer who has spent a decade refining a finishing strategy is not asked to rebuild it somewhere else in order to find out whether a bore is on size.
That separation is also why this tends to be the first workflow shops adopt. It adds a capability without putting anything at risk.
Probing is a process change more than a software change, and the shops that get value from it have usually settled four things.
A probe that is set up and trusted. Calibrated, with a known stylus, and someone who knows its condition. A probe nobody trusts produces numbers nobody acts on.
A post processor that outputs the cycles your control expects. This is the step most often underestimated. Probing output is control-specific and the post has to be right.
Agreement on what gets measured. Measuring everything is slower than measuring nothing and is usually abandoned within a month. The features worth probing are the ones that would be expensive to get wrong.
Somewhere for the result to go. A measurement that lands in a text file on the control and is never looked at has not improved anything. Deciding in advance who reads the inspection report is what makes it real.
The first thing shops notice is not inspection at all. It is setup. Probing the work coordinate system removes a manual task that was slow and was occasionally wrong, and it does it on every job rather than on the complicated ones.
The second is sequencing. When a critical feature can be checked in process, a problem is found while there is still stock and still a located part, which is the only point at which it is cheap to fix.
The third is the one nobody plans for. Once measurement is routine rather than exceptional, the conversation between the machinist and the quality side changes, because both are looking at the same record rather than two accounts of the same part.
SolidCAD has set up probing and inspection workflows with Canadian mold, die and precision machining customers who continue to program in PowerMill. The work is usually a short engagement: confirm the probe and the post, agree what gets measured, and build the first cycles with the people who will run them.
Probing sits exactly where a lot of advice stops being useful, because it touches the CAM, the post, the control and the quality process at the same time. Getting it running is less about software features than about those four things agreeing with each other.
SolidCAD works across the Autodesk manufacturing portfolio and with the machines and controls Canadian shops actually run. We would rather help you prove the workflow on one part than hand you a capability list.
Yes. The two sit alongside each other. PowerMill continues to produce the machining toolpaths and Fusion is used for the probing and inspection operations.
No. On-machine probing answers questions while the part is still located and is strongest for setup, in-process checks and catching problems early. It does not remove the need for a CMM where one is required.
The post processor. Probing output is specific to the control, and a post that has never been asked to produce probing cycles usually needs work before anything useful comes out of the machine.
Not to begin with. Most shops prove it on one machine and one family of parts, then decide how far to take it.
If you have a probe on the machine that is used for edge finding and nothing else, there is a gap between what the hardware can do and what it is doing.
SolidCAD can look at your probe, your post and the parts worth measuring, and help you get the first inspection routine running on a real job.
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