Still bowled over

It happened most recently at Telford, during a visit to Hexagon Metrology (see page 19, Machinery, August 2012). Now you'll know the company for its various metrology products and services. The global company Hexagon AB (Telford's parent) could lay claim to be one that, quite literally, 'measures the world'. But Telford's contribution to that feat goes deeper, to the very root of accurate measurement. Tucked away in the back rooms is a five-man department called the special products group (SPG). One of its activities is the build of equipment that sets the world's length measurement standards in laboratories undertaking primary and legal metrology work. These products include frequency stabilised lasers, plus gauge block and length bar interferometers. The National Physical Laboratory-designed and SPG-built primary calibration products are used in many laboratories around the world for the measurement of their reference gauges. These gauges are linked to what are known in the UK as SET 1 gauge blocks that manufacturing companies, for example, employ as their master reference gauges for their SET 2 working gauge blocks. There is a path back from every measurement device in the workplace to a national standard and, for many countries, to the primary measurement equipment put together by Telford's SPG. So a group of highly skilled individuals in a small department in a company in Shropshire, on behalf of the National Physical laboratory, are the ultimate caretakers of many in the world's ability to know that the measurements they makes are reliable and trustworthy. That's when I had my 'wow' moment. It really is something so critical, yet so hidden from view or mind. Measurement must be consistent and trusted, everywhere, globally. Absolutely everything is measured. A final quirky observation. The small workshop in which the special products group makes bits and pieces has a number of elderly machine tools. These are being rebuilt and cleaned up in-house, with this including slideway hand-scraping – a craft skill not much practised in machine tool building today, let alone outside it. How so? Well, SPG business manager Gary Brice is an ex-Warner & Swasey, Telford, man – Warner & Swasey was a machine tool firm, for those unfamiliar with the name. What irony. Opposite, but linked, ends of the spectrum: the absolute arbiter of measurement – the laser interferometer; and machine tools – the originator of all manufactured part precision, find a link in a small department in Telford. First published in Machinery, August 2012