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Mechanical alignment systems (MAS) are often used for positioning workpieces in manufacturing processes. Although MAS has only considered by most people only for relatively low precision applications, there is no hard physical law to limit the performance of MAS. Design issues for high precision MAS are addressed in this paper. Our simulation study shows that it is important to ensure the same reference surfaces on the workpiece are used to locate it on all stations in a multistation manufacturing process. Otherwise the form errors in particular can introduce significant amount of positioning errors of the parts on the following manufacturing stations. Also for high alignment precision, it is better to choose larger datum size, keep the datum location error between different stations small and select proper datum securing method. It is obvious from our simulation analysis that theoretically there is no hard physical law to limit the performance of MAS. Experiments in this paper demonstrate a fraction of mm alignment precision can be achieved with MAS. Even at this level, we are more limited by the resolution of our position monitoring system and the thermal drifting of the MAS. By carefully selecting the design parameters for the mechanical alignment system with all these considerations, we have the potential to extend the alignment precision of MAS towards the nm region.