Most environmental monitoring programs I see are run in a clean, cold, empty plant. Sanitation finishes at 4 a.m., the swabs go down at 5, the results come back negative, and the report gets filed. The program is compliant.

The world needs more homes. The world also has too much plastic. Perhaps the only thing those two problems have in common is that they’re hard to solve.

Metrology, the scientific study of measurement, has never been faster or more precise. Yet many quality problems that land on a CMM table were decided weeks earlier, when someone measured against a drawing that was no longer the approved one.

Consider a hypothetical turned shaft with a diameter specified as 20.000 mm ± 0.010 mm. The supplier reports 20.009 mm, just inside the upper limit of 20.010 mm, with an expanded measurement uncertainty of 0.003 mm.

If you’re familiar with the maker community, you may already have encountered WhippetInTech, from a design engineer who documents his builds on YouTube.

Manufacturing Day fell on Oct. 2 this year. Manufacturers opened their doors and showed the public what modern manufacturing looks like, and, hopefully, built some interest in manufacturing careers.

Adding a control element to any system may seem like an easy path, even a necessary one. Redundancy reassures the stakeholders and the auditors, and it might become a sales pitch for the customers.

Most shops accept a gauge the same way. They run a gauge repeatability and reproducibility (gauge R&R) study with 10 parts, three appraisers, and three trials. Get a %GRR under 30. File the report and move on.

It’s one of the most dangerous sentences you can hear on a factory floor: “The drawing is updated, and we’re good to go.”

It sounds like the finish line. We fixed it! Nothing else to do here.

Highly reflective metallic surfaces are among the most challenging inspection targets in machine vision.