[mjohnson]

I'm not in the biz - only barely biz-adjacent but I think there's something called "on tool metrology" that actively measures dimensions while work's being done. With some cleverness you could "sneak up" on a surface and work from there.

I think that you're not even in "a house in a decent neighborhood" pricing though. More like "a house with servants quarters". We're doing that in our very expensive corner of the defense industry because, duh, other-people's-money.

I'm doing CT radiography now and there could be some cool ways to use that, but you're again talking hundreds of kilobucks just for the looking, before you ever get to the interpretation or the actual doing. Done right however you get precision into single-digit micrometers. Would be a brilliant way to get exact copies of something.

(national labs are not the real world)