Measuring a Sphere Feature

This procedure describes how to measure a sphere feature.  A sphere feature measure will appear as an activity of the process on the PPR tree. The top of the feature will always be measured first.
To measure a sphere feature, you must have a product loaded and a sphere defined.

  1. Select the parent process or preceding activity for the measure sphere activity. 

  2. On the Inspection Activities toolbar, click Measure Sphere.

  3. Select the defined sphere you wish to measure.

    A Measure Sphere dialog box appears. Select the first tab to measure the cylinder radially; the second to measure it axially.

  4. Alter the information in the dialog box as desired.

    A preview of the path appears as you alter the data.
    In some cases, the probe cannot reach all of the measurement points generated; it can only reach one arc of the sphere.  In this case, select the Check Probe option on the Measure Sphere dialog box. This option generates the measurement points only on the reachable arc of sphere. The arc is specified by the path parameters Start Angle and End Angle, which are calculated by the option (as a result, these options are disabled in the dialog box when Check Probe is selected). The normal of the feature and the stylus vector of the currently activated probe are used to automatically compute the start angle and end angle of path and then generate measurement points within this arc.
      When measuring internal features, if the ratio of diameter/length is greater than 2, you will be prompted with to double check using collision detection tools.
      Modifying the probe approach angles of a particular probe automatically update all the measurement paths that use the particular probe as the current probe. This means that start angle and end angle parameters of path are recalculated for the modified probe angle.
      Move after, Reorder, and Delete Activity commands may change the currently activated probe for measurement paths. Any of these commands trigger an automatic update of the path to reflect the new probe configuration for all features.
      This feature only applies to Inspection Offline.

  5. Once you have defined the measurement desired, click on the OK button.

    The activity is added to the PPR tree.
Note that creating a measure point activity also creates a tag list resource (which consists of sphere path groups) and sphere path applications.
The measured sphere appears highlighted on the part geometry.
If you create this activity before you insert a CMM into the resource list of the PPR tree, you will be asked to confirm that you wish to create the activity without a CMM assigned to it.  You can assign the CMM to all the activities within the process once you are ready to insert the CMM.
  When an outer sphere is being measured, goto points will be added automatically to avoid a collision.