Impala black granite is one of the key components for the world’s most accurate Coordinate Measuring Machines. The best granite is to be found in mines in South Africa.
The are only a couple of Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) manufacturers that still use black granite for their machine bases, X rails, Y beams and Z rams. One of those manufacturers is Wenzel GmbH in Wiestal, Germany.
Impala black granite has proven to be the most structurally and thermally stable material that will insure the high accuracies required by a coordinate measuring machine. Combine those properties with low porosity, low moisture absorption, superior strength, lower coefficient of thermal expansion, uniformity of texture and a non-glaring surface, and you truly have the ideal material for a CMM.
Heike Wenzel-Dafler, joint managing director of Wenzel emphasizes, “We believe the key to Wenzel’s continued success has been our commitment to building the highest quality and most structurally stable and accurate CMMs in the world. And to do that, it’s a necessity that black granite be used for the bases, rails, beams and rams. For those reasons, as well as the need to become more vertically integrated to better control our manufacturing and production processes and costs, Wenzel purchased a granite processing business in Germany in 2006. We made a strategic decision to not follow the direction of the majority of our competitors who continue to outsource not only granite plates, but also high value parts, sub assemblies and even complete machines to manufacturers in China. Wenzel will not compromise its level of quality and the granite, which is the single largest cost in our CMM products, provides Wenzel CMMs with the precision, dynamics and stiffness that most industries want and require,”
