With the advent of the industrial revolution, the standardization of manufactured parts became critical in order to facilitate the reposition, exchange and commerce of industrial items. Nowhere did it became clearer than in the dimension and geometry of machined components; if you could not assure the consistency in size and dimension of your produced parts, your final products would lack quality, if not surely fail, clearly making it difficult for a company to obtain new projects, if not entirely putting you out of business.

With this challenges, early industrial engineers began to concur on the necessity of standardized manufacturing rules and process revision methods that all industries should follow in order to ensure the quality of the final products and guarantee the complete functionality of all produced parts, creating a shared design philosophy that could be understood among all engineers worldwide, regardless of languages or borders. With this objective in mind, industrial engineers began developing Geometric and Dimensional Tolerances standards (‘GD&T’).

What are GD&T standards?

Manufacture designs are detailed in technical engineering drawings, which have their own set of rules to state the ideal size and dimension of a manufactured items, but no process is ideally perfect and variations are to be expected, therefore GD&T notations complement these rules and indicate us not just how much is the process allowed to deviate from the ideal design statements, but how. GD&T instruct us on how these measurements are going to be taken, specifying reference data, type of limits and/or adjustments whether internal or external.

One may consider that GD&T only applies within the realm of the metrology/quality assurance or control laboratories, but in reality modern GD&T goes much further describing the relations of the measurement process with other production areas, from product engineering, production engineering, to materials costs; one may say that GD&T is the glue that binds all production processes together.

Continuous training

For the specific task of mechanical machined products, the constant and proper communication and understanding of both the stated GD&T norms and its symbols is critical for the correct performance of the machining lines, delivering quality products to the clients that won’t be rejected for out-of-norm claims. However, it is very common for non-Quality personnel to lose touch with the norms and symbols since they do not use them frequently, or in the case of new or recently graduated personnel, because they lack the specific knowledge and experience in the area. It is here that YAMAZEN can help you.

This is where YAMAZEN can help you.

YAMAZEN, in due to its direct relation with the Mitutoyo Institute of Metrology provides training seminars for both GD&T and the proper use of the metrology equipment. Mitutoyo has highly trained and skilled teaching staff. These seminars may be full in-depth theoretical and practical week long 40 hours training courses, or shorter day-long specific seminars design to cover a single aspect of a topic, tool or machine, all supported by the long time experience of the Mitutoyo Institute of Metrology and the Mitutoyo tools and technology. These courses or seminars may be presented on-site or at either YAMAZEN or Mitutoyo facilities according to the convenience of the client, in example, just last October 26^th we had a 2 hour seminar on “Basic GD&T knowledge” at our showroom Open House Event. You may contact your YAMAZEN sales representative for more information. As always, continue training is the key to outstanding performance.