What is Precision Engineering is a popular question that you will find posted in many sites when you conduct an online search. The reason for this is that in the modern world there is a huge focus on high precision parts and their manufacture, the manufacture of said parts having becoming highly sophisticated in the latter years. Precision engineering is the powering force behind the manufacture of such parts, and the work of a precision engineer and his painstaking attention to detail making it possible.
What is Precision Engineering : The Role of the Precision Engineer
A precision engineer needs to have a huge and varied knowledge of the world of CAM and CNC, and this knowledge includes both fabrication as well as measurement and control issues. The UK is extremely competitive within the world of CNC, and holds a high ranking position in comparison to other European counterparts. With dedication from the best trained precision engineers, UK companies such as Cam Machine can compete not just within Europe but worldwide with countries such as America and Japan.
Precision engineering is the key to the manufacturing industry, cutting across all disciplines within the world of technology and manufacture. These disciplines include development, design, manufacture, and the measurement of components, and the range of components made within CNC today include parts for the aeronautical industry, machinery, and micro-electronic devices. Precision engineering also deals with many other modern techniques, CAS, dynamic modelling, diamond turning, and tunnelling microscopy being just a few of them.
Precision engineering includes many areas and field that require a high level of accuracy as well as the latest in design, development, and manufacture. Precision control, precision optics, optical fabrication, material processing, and scanning microscopes are all classified within the field of precision engineering. To put things simply, wherever you turn your head, and whatever you are looking at whether at home, under the bonnet of the car, or in your office, you will be surrounded by precision engineered parts.
What is Precision Engineering : The Systematic Approach of the Engineer
The work of the precision engineer requires many things, one of the most important being their systematic approach to determining error. When measurements are made, quantitative assessment is required, precision engineering also involving systematic error budgeting, design methodology, metrology, calibration, precision controls, and error compensation.
The systematic approach of the precision engineer requires the undertaking of various tasks simultaneously, and applying new manufacturing methods. As well as producing components with a tolerance zone as small as a nanometre, they will be involved in the design of new CNC machinery.
Precision engineering is such as wide field, with many smaller fields within, that you can find a precision engineer working in many dozens of different industries. Common industries that employ the work of the precision engineer include the electronics, automotive, aerospace, and optical industries.
It is amazing to note that although CNC machines were not fully operational to after the Second World War, precision engineering dates back to the 2nd century BC. Hipparchus and Ptolemy both used graduated instruments in their ideas, and these ideas are not actually very dissimilar to techniques that are still used today.
The Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution in particular saw many advances in engineering, although there is historical evidence that dates precision engineering back to the time of the ancient Greeks, their astrology and nautical aids working along the same engineering principles that are used today.
A journey through time, starting back in the years before the birth of Christ can see just how precision engineering has developed over the centuries. Although the first instruments that were manufactured may seem primitive by today’s standards, the overall principles have never changed rather they have been developed. The same can be said about the first CNC machines that were first made post Second World War. Although by today’s standards these machines were cumbersome, and were nowhere near as quick or efficient as those of today, the basic of CNC have not changed either.
Just as the field of precision engineer has developed constantly over the last centuries, it will continue to do so. The average machine shop today will boast 5 axes machinery as standard, and manual machining devices are being phased out and no longer found in the vast majority of larger workshops. A journey through time to look at the history of CNC is a fascinating journey and one where you can learn a lot about the life of a precision engineer along the way.
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