Hi All,
For what it's worth, I agree with pmarc on all counts. His explanation of separate requirements, and the additional freedom it allows, is correct and accurate. This guy knows what he's talking about, and I hope that people appreciate the high level of knowledge being demonstrated here.
The objections that are being raised seem to relate more to how one might choose to utilize the additional freedom in manufacturing and inspection (or choose not to utilize it). But hypothesizing that manufacturing or inspection might choose to ignore part of the specification does not make it worthless. At this point I'm not sure if the objections are fully genuine or are just arguments for argument's sake. The dismissive and sarcastic language doesn't help.
The specification of separate requirements allows each characteristic to be inspected in different candidate datum reference frames. In other words, inspected in different setups. Candidate DRF's occur when the degrees of freedom between the datum features (i.e. the part) and the datum feature simulators (i.e. the inspection fixture) are not fully constrained. Examples include the following:
[li]Datum features of size referenced at MMB (usually called datum feature shift, translational and rotational DOF's are only partially constrained)[/li]
[li]Rocking on planar datum features (rotational DOF's are only partially constrained)[/li]
[li]Certain degrees of freedom left completely open (not usually called datum feature shift but it's the same thing)[/li]
The distinction between simultaneous requirements and separate requirements only becomes significant when the degrees of freedom are not fully constrained, so to keep directing the discussion back to fully constrained cases is pointless.
Also, the concept of candidate DRF's is general. It doesn't depend on the geometry of the considered feature. So it doesn't really matter if we have a hole pattern or not, it's just that the examples illustrating separate requirements usually have hole patterns in them. But we can have the same thing for other features with profile controls as well.
Evan Janeshewski
Axymetrix Quality Engineering Inc.