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.

Many components and assemblies have internal features that are difficult to inspect, none more so than additively manufactured parts. Conventional quality control requires samples to be sectioned and subsequently scrapped.

The English language is complex, often logical and illogical, and, as with many languages, can be further confounded by culture, dialect, and its passing from generation to generation. 

From the Latin, consistent means “standing firm.” Today, the word is synonymous with stable, constant, regular, or lacking in deviation.

Readers of this column will be familiar with the subject of measurement uncertainty since I comment on it from time to time, as I did last month. Those readers that have not been that interested in it will certainly run across it on reports from their calibration sources.

If you’ve ever suffered through a difficult lesson, you were likely not in Gary Griffith’s class. Griffith teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), quality audits, measuring and gaging, and other quality-related subjects, and though the technical aspects could make for a dry learning experience, his students say Griffith makes it fun.

Available credentials include both theory, through online tests, and performance, involving hands-on demonstration of skills.

We are frequently asked to quote on gage blocks made to non-standard dimensions. Requests like this leads to a number of questions, the first question being why they are needed in the first place. 

Creaform announced the release of VXelements 6.1, the latest version of its 3D software platform and application suite that includes VXmodel and VXinspect. 

In an age where, if it doesn’t have a digital display it’s not modern, we tend to forget how the levels of precision we measure to came about in the first place. This is a brief look at one of the people we are indebted to for their discoveries and inventions from many years ago.