If both your system and attitude show a sincere effort to do things properly, most auditors will cut you some slack.

Remember that you cannot give your supplier too much information if you want custom-designed and built equipment that meets your expectations.

If a custom-made gage is in your future, it is important to ask the right questions.

If outside facilities do your calibration work, you’ll notice a value shown as measurement uncertainty on their reports.

Masters are critical for all comparative measurements and should duplicate the work to be measured as much as possible.

When we report receiving gages or instruments that are damaged, the first reaction from customers is to blame us for dropping them.

Some gage users would be quite pleased to have gages that keep growing in size to negate wear. Unfortunately, it’s not a controllable situation and will result in your no-go plug gages going oversize on a continuous basis. You win some, you lose some.

With so many gage buyers focusing on costs alone rather than what they are actually getting for their dollars, it follows that suppliers will do the same. It often becomes a situation where a gage buyer pretends to want calibration while the supplier pretends to deliver it.

I recently received an e-mail from a faithful reader who had a problem regarding the calibration of adjustable thread ring gages. He realized that the rings should be verified using calibrated thread setting plugs, but he didn’t have enough of them to cover all of his rings. His company had avoided buying setting plugs in the past, so he doubted they would do so now.

I still get asked questions that were answered many times years ago and wondered why this could be. The answer is simple: Years ago, the people involved in calibration or product inspection got their jobs after serving time as machinists and toolmakers. Today, people are plugged into these areas without the same kind of experience so they’re starting from square one.