It was a rough week for the whole team working on a new customer’s new machine design. Finally, it’s Friday night and you sit down on the couch to relax with your friends. You made some popcorn and just popped in a DVD recommended by your parents. They told you it’s a classic and might be a bit slow but it has a good story. The movie starts and after 30 seconds, your friends are giving you confused looks. The movie is very difficult to watch because it is filmed in stop motion. The images on the screen are frozen and jump from one to the next. Sometimes it is half a second between shifts and sometimes it can be several seconds. You can see the evening disintegrating and quickly move to switch out the movie to ‘The Fast and the Furious’ for some non-stop action.

When a machine’s design calls for an electric linear actuator, most design engineers want to know about an actuator’s accuracy and repeatability…with emphasis on accuracy.

When an engineer is developing a machine design, accuracy is often top-of-mind.  So is machine cost. But these two considerations can be at odds since the usual scenario is that the higher the accuracy of a device, the higher the cost. This certainly holds true for electric linear actuators and linear motion systems.