Do you remember when the only thing a cell phone did was make telephone calls and you had to dial them yourself? 

Gage manufacturers and calibration laboratories often find themselves in this minefield. New gages or instruments are supplied or calibrated and immediately returned by the customer because they aren’t correct.

A reader asked me to comment on a situation he faced regarding calibration frequency for some gages he had on loan from his customer. The gages are only used once a year for this specific customer and—I’m guessing—spend about 80% or more of the year doing nothing.

External thread inspection can seem confusing and, in some cases, frustrating. There is a wide variety of inspection tools available for external threads.

A reader emailed me after reading some of my rants on thread ring gages dealing with the problems that come up in their use and calibration. But he added another dimension to the problem since he is in the calibration business: How do the Europeans deal with their solid thread ring gages?

Environment testing equipment is integral to the management of manufacturing shop floors, though it doesn’t get talked about much. 

The term ‘proficiency testing’ is one that every accredited calibration laboratory is quite familiar with. In basic terms it refers to a method of evaluating how well a laboratory is doing a particular calibration with respect to its claimed measurement uncertainty and how it fares with other participants.

MobileCollect wireless transmits measurements wirelessly from any gaging device with an SPC data port into any software program – from a simple spreadsheet to cloud-based SPC applications. 

It’s time to calibrate your way to better quality. 

How do you measure an internal thread on a part? How do you decide what you need?