I have two Mori Seiki NL2500 lathes. I've been looking at installing a probe in each to do OD and ID inspections. I've looked at the radio and optical probes offered by Renishaw and M&H/Hexagon Metrology. I've seen several posts throughout the forum that mention Renishaw and was curious, how many options do I have for installing a probe on the lathe?

Renishaw originally caught my eye because I saw that they had a Gibbscam plug-in, but unfortunately this is not available for the lathes so I would have to use macro based programming. M&H offers the macro based programming as well but they also offer another software solution called NC Gage but I saw a video of it on youtube and it appears it has a user interface at the controls which is something I need to prevent to avoid having an idle machine to program the probe.

I basically need something that I can program offline. Can someone offer me any advice?

We are in Houston and hoping to get something installed relatively quickly, Renishaw already tells me it will be 4-6 weeks. M&H says it will be 2-4 weeks just for shipping of hardware (doesn't account for how long it will take to get a service engineer down to our place to install).

I would also like to see a sample of macro based programming for an OD and ID measurement.

Reporting and recording of measurements is something else I need to look at. Seems like every time I send questions towards Renishaw and M&H I get incomplete answers or they don't even respond to e-mails....

Thanks in advance for the help!

jmw