GD&T, or Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing, has become an industry standard as well as a different way of describing tolerance. Rather than the traditional reference frame, GD&T emulates the constraints of putting something together, based on the kinds of spatial relationships of the parts.

From April 7th through the 9th, more than 100 users of New River Kinematics’ SpatialAnalyzer came together to discuss the ways they use the product, as well as ask questions and make suggestions.

In 1994, two graduate students from Virginia Tech were working on a project for a local nuclear plant involving steam generator changeout. Joe Calkins and Bob Salerno discovered that the data provided by the measurement software wasn’t useful. All of the instruments came with their own individual software, which made collating data a chore. So they requested better measurement software, only to find none existed. Therefore, they created one. A software package that eventually became known as SpatialAnalyzer.

Bob Salerno, mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics, talks about the advantages of measurement planning (MP), a module of the software program called SpatialAnalyzer.

One of the reasons for the success of NRK is their development philosophy. “We try to write things into our software that benefit everyone. There are lots of uses,” said Joe Calkins, co-founder. They also don’t wait until mid-year to release new versions of software. “Once you have your license key, you can download the latest enhancements to the software each week or month, or whenever you choose,” said Joe. If there’s a need to send the SpatialAnalyzer data to a non-subscriber, a “Viewer” or Read-Only version is available
for download.

Bob Salerno has been in the metrology industry for the past 20 years, and he’s a problem solver. In his role as a mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics, he gets a lot of calls from clients in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries for problem solving.