Having an electronic gage on your floor can look impressive but if the gage is not maintained properly and routinely calibrated, it can lead you down a path of non-conforming parts.  Simple attribute gages have a way of letting you know through visual wear when they are not working properly, and  they are very predictable with setting up certification intervals. Electronic gages on the other hand look impressive but when they are in need of calibration, it can be caused by a careless bump or by dropping a part into it with a little too much force.

The best way to keep an electronic gage in service is to design masters that duplicate your product that you are inspecting.  Birdsall Tool & Gage builds electronic gages that can  quickly reset themselves using a customer master.  With a simple chart and a quick calibration at the beginning and end of a shift, you decrease the possibility of scrap.  BTG gages also can be programmed to give feedback to a machine control so it is even more important to cycle the master in and out of the gage frequently.  The cycle time of calibration is as fast as inspecting a part, so in most cases the re-calibration can be performed while a machining cycle is in progress, eliminating any cost for calibration.

Operator training is very important in that it challenges the operator to be sensitive to any external issues that might jolt or knock the gage out of calibration.   BTG also specializes in failure analysis of gaging systems to foolproof them from the most common causes of damage in your environment.  Sometimes this is a simple as a custom guard around a probe or as complicated as dual probes for a single attribute.  The dual probe concept compares readings and if there is a variance in readings at a predetermined interval, the gage can warn the operator that it is in need of calibration.