There’s a long-lived adage in woodworking and carpentry—measure twice, cut once. As civilization grew and evolved from millions of years ago when primitive cutting tools were used to hunt and gather food, a need for more accurate cutting tools grew and evolved with it.
This situation pops up quite regularly when a relatively simple feature such as the diameter of a hole in a machined part doesn’t appear to be right when the part is at the assembly stage of manufacture. Like similar disputes, the finger pointing begins and compromises are made but the problem doesn’t go away.
My work in inspection, and as a quality management system auditor, provides numerous opportunities to acquire knowledge. It also provides areas of risk for ensuring valid and reliable results.
In this article, I wanted to go beyond the simple go/no go measurements that most air gaging is used for. Air gaging is a highly effective and efficient way for measuring these simple diameter requirements. It is also extremely repeatable on tight tolerances, but for this article, I wanted to focus on using air gaging to measure form requirements such as roundness, flatness, perpendicularity/squareness, taper, straightness, matching, and others.
Our Introduction to Surface Roughness Measurement guidebook is an excellent initiation to noncontact surface roughness measurement. It offers practical information on various topics to help make roughness measurement easy and efficient.
After working at LMI for over 18 years, Terry Arden steps down as CEO role as of January 1, 2021. He will continue to serve as Chief Brand Officer in a part-time role, supporting the LMI Executive in product and business strategy development.
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.
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