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mjohnson mjohnson is online now
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Los Alamos, NM
Posts: 1,766
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Originally Posted by sammyg2 View Post
... calibrated? . That's what standards are for. You don't need some outside yahoo to calibrate your tools for you unless yer brain dead or have a stoopid gubmint contract that requres third party. My machinists are required to check all mikes against a standard and if out, make the adjustment. It aint rocket surgery...
Our "Quality Industrial Complex" pulls that crap with our mics and balances. Requires each and every one to be pulled out of service for a month or so for "calibration" so that it can get a DOE Type 1 cal cert. Such shenanigans aren't required by anyone but the internal cal lab monkeys.

The funny thing is that what we call a Type 3 cal is what the real world does - check before and after use against a calibrated standard. This is somehow seen as inadequate by our cal lab monkeys. I see it as being far superior to a full calibration! The user knows immediately, before the workpiece leaves his station, that the measuring tool was good or bad. The risk of a physical standard (jo blocks/std weights) changing during a calibration interval is FAR less than that of a complex measuring tool (calipers/balance) changing in that same interval. If you rely on every tool being Type 1 certified you put everything you've accepted at risk until that tool closes calibration in 6 mo or a year. The parts you've accepted since then might be long gone - and you have to call them back and go through tons of paperwork agony.

Oy the hangovers I used to have when I lived this life as a product engineer...

Well that was a rant -- get some gage blocks kids!

And I'm thankful that for home use I have my grandfather's measurement stuff - he was an aerospace tooling machinist in the '50s and '60s. No chinese stuff there!
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Old 12-06-2013, 07:50 AM
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