At first glance, you might think I’m losing it with the title of this month’s rant. After all, who would pay anything for ‘zero’ or nothing? It turns out a lot of people try to get ‘nothing’ or ‘zero’ and end up with more than they bargained for at a very high cost to get there.
The most common example of this situation occurs when determining tolerances for setting masters used in a variety of measuring applications. Since ‘masters’ are involved, it is normal to want them to be more precise than the devices they are being used to set. Unfortunately, there’s more to it all than shifting a decimal point on a dimension.