Machine tool probes testing using a moving inner hemispherical master artefact

The growing popularity of usage of touch probes for CNC machine tools has created an increasing requirement to test their accuracy. Indirect methods used until now, based on the measurement of a material gauge with a machine tool equipped with a probe, made the separation of machine tool errors from probe errors impossible. In this article, a new method of testing the probe accuracy, which does not employ a machine tool, is presented. This method employs a moving master artefact in the form of an inner hemisphere. The standard uncertainty of the determination of triggering radius variation is 0.35 μm.