Portable large scale metrology instruments continue to gain popularity due to their increasing use in industrial applications. As a result, it has become more and more crucial to develop reliable large scale artifacts or other large scale equipment to evaluate and verify the performance of such instruments. The work described in this research involves the design and construction of such a piece of equipment, namely a metrology bench consisting of a rail-carriage system for the purposes of calibration of artifacts including scale bars, tapes and performance evaluation of commercial large scale metrology instruments such as laser trackers. This work also demonstrates the use of the bench for applications including ball bar calibration and evaluation of interferometric ranging capability of a laser tracker by comparison against a reference interferometer. The conventional methodology of a back-to-back ranging test presented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been modified to eliminate some sources of uncertainty. Further, an alternative approach is introduced for a common-path test method presented by NIST. This approach is believed to ease setup and lower the cost. Several environmental sensors have been integrated into the bench system to enable effective thermal compensation and this is shown to improve measurement results. Uncertainty analyses have been carried out to study the influence of the bench properties, among other contributing factors, on the measured quantities, and the varying trends of these uncertainties are brought out.
