Portable metrology for large scale installations and alignments

PES (UK) Ltd provides high quality engineered products and materials to global industries, along with specialist installation and design services. Operating in fields such as construction, formula 1, engineering, aerospace, printing, energy (onshore & offshore), automotive, rail, scientific and defence industries since 1979.

As well as numerous projects within the UK, the various missions of PES take them all over the world covering project management and installations in far flung places such as Dubai, Turkey, Vietnam, Israel, Australia, USA and China. Hostile environments such as the North Sea are no obstacle for PES. Portable CMMs (Coordinate Measuring Machines) from Hexagon Metrology make a significant contribution to PES’s success.

PES’s work covers the machine tool market with equipment like precision levelling mounts for machine tools, vibration control, bed plates and surface tables. They also cover alignment work for installations utilising high strength grouts and repair mortars. Onlookers would be forgiven for thinking that concrete and grouting work such as this is easily measured with a tape rule, in fact this requires high precision measurement on a very large scale.

A long term relationship
“PES have been using measurement and surveying systems from Leica Geosystems since those very early days back in 1979”, explains Robert Elsey, Managing Director. “We started off using several manual Wild T2 Theodolites which served us well for years and then we purchased a Leica TDA5005 which brought us into the digital age”.

The Leica TDA5005 Industrial Total Station is primarily used for alignment projects and is credited with having allowed PES to tender for, and win, many new and challenging projects. More recently the requirement for even higher accuracy in their line of work led them to consider a product from the world of Portable CMMs. Obtaining the Leica Absolute Tracker AT401 has allowed the company to progress even further into the field of large scale alignments.

Alignment on a huge scale
A recent project undertaken on behalf of Broetje Automation at GKN Aerospace in Bristol was the layout of a complete new manufacturing facility for the Airbus A350 composite wing spars. Broetje needed a supplier that could cover marking out, drilling, installing, levelling, aligning and grouting of hundreds of positioning cones – all skills that PES could cover. The cones would be . . . . .