MeasureMax programming and support for the Sheffield that won't quit

Still running, still worth supporting

The Cordax years, and the software that ran them

Sheffield thrived under Giddings & Lewis, the Fond du Lac machine-tool builder that grew out of an 1859 machine shop. Those were the Cordax years: through the 1990s, Cordax CMMs such as the RS-50 and the shop-floor Discovery were among the most common machines in American quality labs and on shop floors.

MeasureMax ran them, with MaxLite shipped alongside as a simpler, step-by-step front end for the shop floor. MeasureMax+, the later release, was Windows-based, with real-time statistics and Visual Basic built in.

Giddings & Lewis itself was sold in 1997, and the Endeavor line came after. In 2004 Hexagon bought the Sheffield CMM business and formed Sheffield Measurement Inc. in Fond du Lac to run it. Within a few years, new Sheffield machines shipped with PC-DMIS as standard, and the Sheffield name eventually faded into Hexagon's lineup.

MeasureMax stayed with the machines already running it, and many of those machines are still measuring parts today. The experience here comes from those years: MeasureMax work from 1995 into the mid-2000s, across MaxLite, MeasureMax and MeasureMax+, with years of Visual Basic written inside it.

When the old controller finally gives out

A Sheffield's structure tends to outlast its electronics. When the original controller can't be kept running, a retrofit to a Renishaw UCC controller is a common path, and Renishaw's MMclient lets the original MeasureMax software run on the retrofitted machine, so existing programs keep running with minimal or no changes.

New programs on the retrofitted machine get written in current software such as CMM-Manager, and both can sit on the same computer, so nothing already proven out is lost while the new programs come online.

There is no translator from MeasureMax to PC-DMIS or any other current software. Moving a program means rewriting it, and we do that too, one program at a time, at whatever pace the shop needs.

Frequently asked questions