A method of modelling a commercial high precision Co-ordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) is presented. Control strategies to improve performance developed during the research programme are discussed. Simulation and practical results verify the accuracy of the model generated and show the improvements in performance obtained by applying state feedback techniques. Two self commissioning methods were evaluated on a test rig and a CMM. The resonance method gave the best results on the test rig, but has limited use on a practical machine, due to the large number of programmable parameters that need to be chosen and the danger of causing excessive vibration. The position error method gave consistent results on the test rig and CMM, although the performance was slightly inferior to that of the best manually tuned system.