Roundness measurement of spherical artifacts at arbitrary latitude

This technical note examines an approach to measuring the roundness of spherical artifacts at arbitrary latitude. A roundness measurement includes the combined contributions from the artifact’ form error and the spindle’ error motion. We show that it is possible to separate the spindle error from artifact form error at any inclination with respect to the axis of rotation if the axial and radial error motion is independently measured using an error separation technique such as Donaldson reversal. Comparison of the predicted and measured results shows agreement to less than a nanometer.