Calibration is not just about having stickers on your equipment with dates that say everything is okay. All gaging equipment must be calibrated periodically to ensure that it’s capable of performing the job for which it’s intended, i.e., measuring parts accurately. Whether you’re a small machine shop or a large multi-million dollar manufacturing giant, you undoubtedly use any number of gages or gaging systems to maintain the standards for quality in your production. The accuracy of these dimensional measuring instruments must be periodically checked to ensure that they are working properly.
Maintaining and checking the performance of hundreds or thousands of gages can be a pretty costly proposition, whether you buy the equipment and hire the people to do it internally, or send the gages to an outside calibration service to perform the checking for you. For most manufacturing facilities, the most economical approach is to hire a calibration service to do this verification for you.