Noticed a big shift in how we check tolerances over the past 5 years

I started running a Haas VF-2 back in 2019, and back then everyone used those old-school micrometers and calipers for every part check. Now I walk into the shop and it's all CMM probes and laser scanners, even for simple parts... I remember spending 15 minutes measuring a single bracket on a bridgeport, now the same check takes less than 60 seconds. The old guys swear the manual tools catch things the digital stuff misses, but it's hard to argue with the time saved. We had a job last month for a medical bracket, tolerance of plus 0.0005, and the CMM flagged a bad edge in about 2 minutes flat. Anyone else see a drop in trust for the old methods around here?

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jordancoleman1mo agoMost Upvoted

You really think a CMM can reliably catch an edge condition that a manual operator would have felt with their fingertips? I've seen those machines miss burrs that a caliper would have snagged on, because the probe just takes a pre-programmed set of points and moves on. The trade-off is speed versus that human touch, you know, the kind of feel for the metal that comes from years of tweaking. That medical bracket job sounds impressive for speed, but did they double-check the CMM's flagged edge with a comparator or anything afterwards?