What is air gaging? The what, who, why, and where of air gaging.

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. 

All the buzz these days is about laser micrometers and vision systems. If you visit a tradeshow or get any online advertisement, many companies are promoting these measuring methods.

The biggest trend we are seeing in the manufacturing industry is automating the inspection process using robots. According to a projection from ABI Research, the number of industrial robots sold in the U.S. will jump nearly 300% in less than a decade. 

In recent years, we have seen an upward trend of higher production manufacturers wanting to integrate their air gaging quality checks from a stand-alone, outside of machine device where the operator is performing a manual check, to an automated in-process gage.