Harry and Zeke used to own a small job shop in Berlin, New Hampshire. A couple years ago things got a little slow and they needed to find an additional source of income. They decided to follow their passion and create a limited edition snowmobile, custom-designed to survive and thrive on some of the nastiest trails known to mankind.

Fast-forward a year, and the feisty duo had managed to produce and sell 27 Trailbounder units that quickly gained a reputation for durability, maneuverability and—relatively speaking—comfort.  Better still, Harry and Zeke had finished a prototype for the advanced Trailbounder II and local distributors were lining up in numbers the middle-aged machinists never dreamed possible.

There was no way Harry and Zeke could satisfy demand building Trailbounder IIs in their little job shop. However, down the road a piece in Stamford, Connecticut, Shifty Equipment Corporation had taken a fancy to the new snowmobile design. They offered to buy the partners out and install them as Vice Presidents of design, testing and marketing for a new Trailbounder subsidiary. So Harry and Zeke sold their job shop to their loyal employees and moved their operations to a big garage 15 miles further north and adjacent to the very trails the boys had been using to torture their product designs.

It seemed to be a marriage made in heaven. Shifty Equipment people set up a prototype production line for Trailbounders in Stamford, and the boys began refining and testing their brainchild on the rocky trails of New Hampshire. But soon a heavy dose of reality had to be swallowed.

After the boys finished banging the hell out of a Trailbounder, failure analyses had to be performed, the defects fixed, and changes documented on the CAD model so that CNC manufacturing programs could be changed and tooling modified. Making the design modifications to the Trailbounder was not much of a problem because Zeke was a whiz with a ballpene hammer. A whack here, a few bashes there and the vibrating engine cover not only stopped vibrating, it also looked better.

However, collecting data on the modifications and getting it back into the engineering system at the plant was more of a problem. Every few days, after intensive field trials, they would toss a Trailbounder unit on the back of a pickup truck and cart it down to Stamford—a six or seven hour trip on a good day, but only the deity knows how long when the snow is flying.  Once there, the unit would go on a big CMM for full assembly data collection and analysis. Then the unit would be stripped down so that individual components could be evaluated. Finally the CAD models for parts and tooling could be updated. This never went smoothly because Trailbounder II inspections had to be interspersed with other important work going on in the metrology lab.

By February many more Trials still needed before Trailbounder II and its production line would be ready. At the current pace it was not going to happen before all the snow melted from the testing trails.  The temperature outside was 7 below but Harry and Zeke were steaming.

So one Monday morning they made numerous excuses why neither could make the trek to Stamford that week. They also asked Shifty to get them their own large table coordinate measuring machine, so Harry and Zeke could control their own dimensional testing schedules. On Friday, much to their surprise, they received a phone call from the Shifty people informing them that someone named E.M. Sleuth would show up on Monday with the equipment they needed.

Harry and Zeke, who were expecting a tractor-trailer, were surprised when this Sleuth drove up in a minivan and proclaimed that he had everything they needed. It was packed in an aluminum case far smaller than one of their snowmobiles. He had configured the equipment himself and they were all set, he assured them.

So what was in the case?  A late model arm style coordinate measuring system, a WiFi-equipped laptop computer, loaded with common CAD-Based measuring Software (the same software Shifty Equipment used on its CMM; a hard drive for program and data storage, a tactile measurement probe and a laser scanning probe for collecting clouds of points really fast—everything but a partridge in a pear tree.

Sleuth said he hated the snow, but he would stay and work with them for a week to make sure they got the hang of it. The boys needed some training in arm operation, but not all that much because they were already familiar with CMMs. Besides, the common software had many automatic features that guided Harry and Zeke through required measurement steps.

Very little measurement programming was needed because the sleuth had already loaded the hard drive with all of the programs Shifty Equipment had written to measure snowmobile parts on its CMM.  The laser probe would be used to capture clouds of surface points for reverse engineering after Zeke made one of his patented ballpene modifications. The WiFi made it possible to use the measurement arm anywhere in the garage and then ship the information back to Shifty Equipment for analysis via the Internet. If other programs were needed, they could be sent up from the plant.

Within that week the boys’ status had gone from “lost in the boonies” to “closely connected” to Shifty Equipment’s enterprise metrology system. True to his word, the Sleuth left on Friday. If the boys needed any additional assistance, he promised to work with them online. Just before leaving Sleuth handed each of the boys one of his business cards with the motto “Move Data, Not Parts” emblazoned on the back.  He was never seen in those parts again.
 
Harry and Zeke were very happy for the rest of the winter. They spent many blissful hours bouncing their snowmobile design over the washboard trails, and then collecting data with the arm to analyze and correct flaws in the product. Hyperspace hummed with data that Shifty Equipment’s engineering department needed to ready the Snowbounder II line for full production on schedule.

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