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Coming To Terms With Accuracy
A question I am frequently asked is, "How accurate is that gage?" I am usually tempted to say something like, "Super accurate" or "So accurate you wouldn't believe it!" But I don't. Instead, I take a deep breath and give my questioner a couple paragraphs worth of information, then watch his jaw drop because he was only expecting a few words.
Read MoreWhere's The Fault? SWIPE To Find Out
Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad tidings. This goes back to the dawn of recorded history, when a tribal leader might easily decide to kill the messenger if the news was not to his liking.
Read MoreGaging Oldies But Goodies—A Review Of Some Things We Should Know By Now
Ten years ago this month, Quality Gaging Tips first appeared in Modern Machine Shop. Since that time, we have covered many tools and techniques for assuring accurate, repeatable measurement and gaging in machine shops.
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Do's And Don'ts For Keeping Dial Indicators In The Game
Just because dial indicators have been around since the early 1900s, don't expect them to fade away with the last century. This tool's long-term popularity is well earned.
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What Good Is A Parallelogram?
Do you remember learning the names of weird shapes in elementary school and then later in geometry? There were isosceles triangles, parallelograms and dodecahedrons. What good would come of all this bizarre knowledge in “real life?” Well, it turns out that at least one of these shapes is very important to those of us who lay out gaging setups or select precision measurement tools.
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Hand Tools Get Geared Up
Gears, while being a fundamental means of transferring motion and power and being simple in principle, are components with complex geometries that must be made with great precision to avoid premature component failure and high warranty costs. In recent years, tools and processes for measuring gears have come under great scrutiny by manufacturers, as well as reputable third parties such as NIST.
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Stylin' With Your Micrometer
Convenience is one reason the micrometer is often the tool of choice for length/diameter measurements. The basic micrometer provides direct size information quickly, has high resolution and is adaptable to many different measurement applications.
Read More3, 2, 1, Contact—Measuring Thickness
Thickness is one of the most frequently measured dimensions and also one that is easy to understand. So you might think that someone would come up with a one-style-fits-all measurement approach for just about every kind of thickness application.
Read MoreIt Don't Mean A Thing If It's Got That Spring-What To Do When Your Fixture Isn't As Fixed As You Thought
Believe it or not, one of the most overlooked problems in qualifying gages is unanticipated deflection of the fixture due to the force of the probe on the part. Who would have guessed? After all, fixtures are used to provide stability.
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What's Wrong With This Picture? On The Care And Feeding Of Master Rings And Other Metrology Artifacts
Quality assurance can only be as good as the measuring tools it relies on. It should be obvious that if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a measuring machine, you need to protect this investment with routine maintenance and calibration.
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Deep Thinking About Depth Gages And Their Evolution
A depth gage is a very common hand tool used to inspect the depth of holes, slots, counterbores, recesses or the distance from one surface to another. They are especially common in the tool and die industry.
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Electrical Limit Switches: Not New, But Tried And True
There is a category of gages that have been around for 50 years; are very inexpensive compared to alternate measuring methods; and are fast, reliable, easy to set up and functional for manual or automatic operations. I'm referring to mechanical gages that incorporate electrical limit switches.
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