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Calibration Of Precision Measuring Equipment


Guest Bullet Remington
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Guest Bullet Remington

Alright, this question is geared to the People that actually know what they're doing and jow the machines work!! :P

 

Transport requires that we maintain a regular schedule and procedure/s for calibration of torque wrenches, Diff Testers, vernier calipers, dail test indicators etc, etc.

 

I hauled about 1/3 of my gear over to a certain company here in calgary to have mine done. (Only some remeber). I checked the reciepts for the actual costs of these tools, AND I went down downtown to check on the cost of replacement tools. Here's the deal:

 

The total cost to replace the tools, which included, two torque wrenches, 1 inche pounds and 1 foot pounds: 1 Dail test indicator: 1 High pressure Air gauge: 1 low pressure air gauge: One Pacific Scientific cable tensiometer.

 

The torque wrenches cost: $38.50 and $43.95. Cost to calibrate: $49.00 each!

 

The diff tester cost $127.00, cost to calibrate = $149.50, the Dail test Indicator cost $339.99 cost to calibrate = $195.00, Cable tensiometer cost $395.00, cost to calibrate = $210.00,low pressure air gauge cost $24.00 cost to calibrate = $51.00, can't find a comparable High Pressure gauge here in the city, but the cost to calibrate this one was $310.00.

 

At this juncture, I can replace all the tools for less than half of the total cost of calibration! Which means that it is far, far cheaper for me to buy new every year then to have them calibrated! OR, buy digital self-zeroing tools!

 

I have provided Transport with an in-house solution for calibration of the diff tester that's acceptable to them, and I have a digital self-zeroing vernier that they accepted as acceptable.

 

Any other individuals. companies or otherwise have any dealings with this situation? Anybody have any other methods of in-house calibration that Transport has accepted as acceptable??

 

I know from experience that Transport will allow you a year from date "new" without having to have a tool calibrated!

 

At this point, other than the cable tensiometer, I'm not paying those prices for calibration of tools.

 

Thoughts, suggestions and comments solicited!!

 

Oh, and just to clarify, all my tools are stored in protective containers, set to zero when not inuse, AND required no adjustment to bring them back within acceptable limits.

 

I did own a Master Compass, bought it state side for $495.00 USD and they wanted $675.00 to claibrate that!! I bought a digital Prop sync/ tach checker, and those don't require calibration!

 

Have a great New Year folks!!

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Hey Bullet, Happy New Year

 

Back in 1989 when I was apprenticing at a certain Calgary Avionics/Instrument shop, I used to do the torque wrench calibrations, back then they were about $38.00 per wrench but rarely took longer than 5 or 10 minutes each to do.

 

Seems the cost of the tools have gone down and the Calibration has gone up, what a rip for 5 minutes of work!

 

Especially when the labour was only $12.00 an hour! :wacko:

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Guest Bullet Remington

Hice:

 

Ya know us Newfies, if it begins with an I, an O or an A we hadd an H!! LOL :rolleyes:

 

Ya, I can relate to the time required to calibrate a torque wrench. I used to run tool Control for a while when I was in the military. Even when the thing was outa calibration and needed to be adjusted, it only took about 20 minutes, and that included the time to melt and pull the solder outa the adjustment screw fer God's sake!!

 

Unless I can find a place in Calgary that will do them cheaper than I'm getting right now, I just might search around the States and see if i can find a digital Master Gauge and start doing the calibrations cheaper than the folks around here are doing them for!!

 

You wouldn't happen to know any other places that do cals, other than that company in the Same hanger as Dynamic Flight Center would, ya?? ( AND , no folks, Dynamic is NOT the company I'm whining about!!)

 

I just think its outrageous, the price these buffoons are charging! I suppose though, the minute it gets passed into law, that they must be calibrated, people figure that can rape ya on the price!!

 

Yeah, I think starting tomorrow I'll be lookin around to do calibrations myself!!

 

If anybody wants the procedure for doing "In-House" calibrations on the Diff tester, PM me and I'll see if I can download a copy from the Hanger computer and send it out to ya! Ain't alot involved in doing it yaself!

 

Have a great one!

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Hice:

 

Ya know us Newfies, if it begins with an I, an O or an A we hadd an H!! LOL :rolleyes:

 

Ya, I can relate to the time required to calibrate a torque wrench. I used to run tool Control for a while when I was in the military. Even when the thing was outa calibration and needed to be adjusted, it only took about 20 minutes, and that included the time to melt and pull the solder outa the adjustment screw fer God's sake!!

 

Unless I can find a place in Calgary that will do them cheaper than I'm getting right now, I just might search around the States and see if i can find a digital Master Gauge and start doing the calibrations cheaper than the folks around here are doing them for!!

 

You wouldn't happen to know any other places that do cals, other than that company in the Same hanger as Dynamic Flight Center would, ya?? ( AND , no folks, Dynamic is NOT the company I'm whining about!!)

 

I just think its outrageous, the price these buffoons are charging! I suppose though, the minute it gets passed into law, that they must be calibrated, people figure that can rape ya on the price!!

 

Yeah, I think starting tomorrow I'll be lookin around to do calibrations myself!!

 

If anybody wants the procedure for doing "In-House" calibrations on the Diff tester, PM me and I'll see if I can download a copy from the Hanger computer and send it out to ya! Ain't alot involved in doing it yaself!

 

Have a great one!

 

Just out of curiosity, does the shop doing the calibration checks have TC approval for doing such things? If not, how does TC ensure that the company calibrates the tooling used for calibrating yours?

 

To make things easier for your self, all you need to do is to get a calibrated block that you can use to verify calibration of all of your measuring tools and then only have your block calibrated by an outside agency.

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Guest Bullet Remington
Just out of curiosity, does the shop doing the calibration checks have TC approval for doing such things? If not, how does TC ensure that the company calibrates the tooling used for calibrating yours?

 

To make things easier for your self, all you need to do is to get a calibrated block that you can use to verify calibration of all of your measuring tools and then only have your block calibrated by an outside agency.

 

 

47G:

 

Yes, the company has TC approval, they also overhaul Starter/Gens, coffe makers, etc, etc. Company's name begins with a "C", and its a birds name!!

 

I am well aware of the usage of sine blocks for calibration. However, we are still back to square one with that, I will still need to have the sine block calibrated. My point here is to be able to do everything in house, period.

 

As far as I'm concened, a torque wrench or any other tool/equipment that does not need adjustment, should NOT cost more than the original price of the tool/equipment!

 

anyways, I'm definitely looking at getting a process in place to negate the requirement to go out-of-house.

 

Every year I have to pay double the cost of the tools to get them calibrated. That is absolutely rediculous!

 

Cheers, folks.

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When I was rewriting our MPM, I contacted Snap-on and Mac Tools to ask what is the required recalibration standards for their tools. I received letters from both company's basically stating that they don't make recalibration schedules for the tools since cycling is variable for each application. They are only concerned with the cycling of their tools and calendar recalibrations are irrelevant.

I contacted our local recalibration company and told them of my plan to set up a recalibration schedule so that we could calibrate all of the company's tools now and in one year have them all recalibrated again. From the data that they would provide me we would determine if we can extend the recalibration period to 18 months or not. Then when the tools are returned after 18 months (if the data supported this schedule) we would review the data again and see if we can extend the recalibration period even further.

Now you are saying I just wrote that calendar schedules were irrelavent but since most of our tools may only be used once a month or less (low cycling), Transport Canada said OK to my plan and appoved this recalibration procedure in our manual.

So basically I am going to set all of the company's tool recalibration intervals based on this data from ongoing testing. It may take a few years but I will eventually have hard data on calibration requirements for each type of tool and be able to set defined limits in the MPM.

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Guest Bullet Remington

Amodao:

 

Yeah I did the same thing with Snap-on. I don't use Mac tools, but that's a different story!

 

I use the torque wrenches daily, and if I had my way they'd be calibrated every 30 days. But that's just me.

 

The verniers and dial teat indicators, I use those pretty well weekly and daily as well. I have Structures approval as well as mechanical.

 

The Diff tester I use about once a month but I calibrate that each time I use it, which is a bit of an idiotic thing, cause I'm using it to measure a leak!

 

I have no difficulty in calibrating the tools, my annoyance is with the unwarranted cost/s involved!!

 

Do let us know how you make out with TC on the calibration schedule interval increase.

 

For me that would be interesting!

 

Cheers

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Happy New Year BR!

We use a different company in (I think they are in YYC, but not positive...) for cal., had bad experiences with the C-name. Not sure what we pay though, I route everything to stores, they send it and it comes back. All of ours are done through ICL (International Calibration Laboritories), I can find out contact info if you are curious. I wasn't aware that anyone would bill that much for calibrations, and I agree that is nothing short of ridiculous. Oh and....you have a PM! ;)

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i think the cost of calibrating equipment is a cost of doing business. and yes i agree that the price is too high. Since you know the cost yearly of calibrating your equipment, it's no big task to work it into your billing.

Where I work, every tool purchased, regardless of where it came from must be calibrated prior to use and every year there after. and every week torque wrenches must be checked with the blocks mentioned. it's not a problem here as it's all in house, but thats what you have to do when you want to run a high quality program.

When calibration comes around and a torque wrench is found out of limits, one needs to look at all the work done using that wrench and consider recalling those items for repair. The weekly check sure helps you limit the extent of recalls.

 

a tool is only as good as it's accuracy.

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We get all ours done at Airborne Precision Instruments in Calgary once a year. We also don't use a new tool until it's calibrated. I'm not sure what the cost is but I haven't heard any complaining from "the guy who signs the checks yet"!

Transport Canada allows you to go up to 24 months interval but the safety consultants that come visit us don't seem to like that, so 12 months it is!

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