Evaluation of Proposed Test Artifacts for Five-Axis Machine Tools | NIST

1 Official contribution of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); not subject to copyright in the United States. The full descriptions of the procedures used in the paper require the identification of certain commercial products. The inclusion of such information should in no way be construed as indicating that such products are endorsed by NIST or are recommended by NIST that they are necessarily the best materials, instruments, software or suppliers for the purposes described. INTRODUCTION In machine tool metrology, there are two primary ways to evaluate the performance of a machine tool: through a series of instrumented tests and through the manufacturing of test pieces. Advantages of test pieces are that machining parts is more akin to the actual purpose of the machine tool and that they do not require specialized measuring instruments. The disadvantages are that test pieces are composite tests—all errors present in the machine tool contribute to errors in the part— and part production is complicated by cutting forces and tool dynamics.