Thread: HP 5526A Laser Interferometer

Too cool!

Nicely bought and described Ray

Now you will be the king of machine surveys, and of course there will be no excuse not to have all your machines in perfect alignment, flatness etc..

Wow Ray, I dont even recognize half those pieces with them sticky black mess removed. Great to hear the laser still fires up.
I think you might have got to the bottom of the "is this close enough" rabbit hole!

Stuart

If I ever need to borrow the system, I think I'd also need the operator.

+1 on the operator. I could ply you with coffee til the cows came home on the off chance that you could configure my new fangled electo-thingy lathe drive system. And you could verify the geometric survey all at the same time. Such a deal for you! Oy vey!

Grigorovich

Well done Ray!
What a brilliant piece of equipment - and now in the right hands too.
I look forward to the new calibration chart for the granite plate!
I have two other surface plates I would love to kow more about .... one day.

Hi All,

Thanks all for the encouragement, sounds like I'll have to draw up a schedule for the travelling machine survey circus.... GQ get's front billing with his famous coffee on offer.. that's an offer I can't refuse...
Stuart is almost a part owner, since I wouldn't have bought it without his intelligence gathering.

Joe, any time you want to check those surface plates, let me know, should make for a fun afternoon.

In the brief period i've had playing around with it I see a really annoying feature.. whenever the beam is broken the measurement resets... Phil already mentioned this to me during a phone conversation, and he's right.. wires and levels don't have this problem.

Looking at the circuits, it appears that the laser head sends a frequency output to the display head and when this signal isn't present it resets, ( I'll have to dig a bit deeper to confirm the way the logic works ) but, I'm thinking maybe I can modify it with so that a micro monitors the frequency output and if present it just passes through to the display unit, and if the beam is broken and the signal disappears the micro would continue generating a dummy signal to stop the display resetting.

The effect would be that if the beam is lost the display just freezes ( or goes to some weird value) until the beam is restored...


The surface plate calibration procedure looks interesting, you can leave the laser head set up in a fixed location.. and the rest is done with smoke and mirrors ( well maybe not so much smoke)


\

The program runs on the HP9815 calculator and automatically generates the familiar looking isometric plot of the surface plate calibration



Can't wait to see if it works...

Regards
Ray

Damn! Why did I ever decide to not bid with that much fun on offer

Interestingly I priced the latest incarnation of this system a month or so back. The basic bits with auto-compensation + length measurement is around $35k.

Michael

... a quick search found several pages, but this on is dedicated to your particular machine:

HP 5526a Page

Regards,

Originally Posted by Michael G

Damn! Why did I ever decide to not bid with that much fun on offer

Interestingly I priced the latest incarnation of this system a month or so back. The basic bits with auto-compensation + length measurement is around $35k.

Michael

Hi Michael,
Back in the 1970's I remember the first HP programmable calculator being demonstrated when I was working at CSIRO, the calculator was then $700, at a time when my fortnightly salary ( as a lowly TA) was $72, so that was nearly 6 months wages. Now you can buy a much more powerfull computer for pretty much the same money, (say less than 1000) and programmable calculators are still in the same general price range.. Computing power just keeps getting cheaper.

The HP9815 is similar to one I used to use back in those days, we used to use it with the hp plotter to generate graphs of experimental results, and I was the menial who had to enter pages and pages of experimental data.. this is bringing back fond memories..

And yes, you would have fun with this system.. well maybe you still will when that other job comes up, later next year was it?

Thanks Kraehe, for the link, good site, I've sent an email, I think I can help him out with some of the manuals he's looking for.


Regards
Ray

If you like nixie tubes, you'll love one of these: Nixie Clocks

Originally Posted by RayG

The system dates to the late 1970's and sorting through the manuals I found the original documentation for the purchase order, the system cost $38,437 on December 1st 1979, and there is an
interesting note next to the Automatic Compensation Option, "Not Purchased use tables instead" (cheap buggers) it would have only cost them just on an additional $5800 to buy the Automatic Compensation Option.

What we used to do, is ring the closest Airport and get current air pressure and wind speed readings.

Originally Posted by RayG

I think the original purchaser might have been Zenford Zeigler (Reservoir) It was last sold in 1994, by Kirby Engineering ( Revesby NSW), to Production Machine Tools ( Silverwater NSW), at some stage the unit was checked by the CSIRO Divsion of Applied Physics,

I know that machine. Its cursed I tell you. 0.01 um resolution, you will get dizzy watching that. Say you were using that in Shepparton, and I was to sneeze. That will set it off.

Zenford were lucky to still have it, we had it on a job at the State dock yards Newcastle, 9 months in the year I turned 22, 1985. We had it stashed in one of the engineers rooms at the hotel, a place just off Hunter street. Just inside the door. The cleaner forgot to close the door, and it sat there all day in plain view.

Regards Phil.

Originally Posted by Machtool

What we used to do, is ring the closest Airport and get current air pressure and wind speed readings.


Regards Phil.

Today you can just download the app "Aero Weather" on your smart phone and get the nearest met station report every half hour. Its free. (Smart phones with apps like these are the single greatest advance in flight safety in ten years. Or more.)

I saw a little gauge just today on a laser-engraved Z-Z fixed holder.

Greg

Originally Posted by Machtool

What we used to do, is ring the closest Airport and get current air pressure and wind speed readings.

I know that machine. Its cursed I tell you. 0.01 um resolution, you will get dizzy watching that. Say you were using that in Shepparton, and I was to sneeze. That will set it off.

Zenford were lucky to still have it, we had it on a job at the State dock yards Newcastle, 9 months in the year I turned 22, 1985. We had it stashed in one of the engineers rooms at the hotel, a place just off Hunter street. Just inside the door. The cleaner forgot to close the door, and it sat there all day in plain view.

Regards Phil.

Hi Phil,

Small world, The Zenford engineer that appears in the various documents is Ian Tierney, ( any bells? ) I've been looking up info on Karl Zeigler, interesting stuff.. Ed Nicholson ZZ made some interesting stuff..

Its cursed I tell you. 0.01 um resolution, you will get dizzy watching that.

Time has come to finally fit Automatic Compensation, probably won't make all that much difference, but worth a try. If that fails to lift the curse, I'll try sacrificing chickens while facing the rising sun

Thanks for correcting the spelling of Ziegler, I got the incorrect "Siegler" spelling from a Hewlett Packard letter to Ian Tierney, obviously HP got it wrong...

Finished cleaning the remaining parts today, and chasing up pens for the plotter, should be able to try making some proper measurements soon.

Regards
Ray

Originally Posted by Machtool

I know that machine. Its cursed I tell you. 0.01 um resolution, you will get dizzy watching that. Say you were using that in Shepparton, and I was to sneeze. That will set it off.

Surely you're not saying that Ray should put a piece of tape over the 0.01s and call 0.0001mm close enough?

Stuart