Original Date: 07/01/1991
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Kurt Manufacturing is pioneering their quality control efforts with the assistance of modular gaging techniques to reduce product cost and increase product throughput. Quality control of a machined product requires time consuming and costly control measures to ensure customer requirements are met. Standard gaging techniques typically include an array of hard gaging such as set blocks, thread gages, plug gages, calipers, and micrometers. Complex geometric shapes also require more elaborate and costly gaging techniques - typically NC machine programs with qualified tooling, CMM, and an array of dedicated gaging fixtures to satisfy requirements. Modular gaging is based on standardizing the required hardware, breaking it into manageable, reusable, component-like subassemblies, then providing a common plug-in type platform which the end-user can customize to suit a given condition.

Kurt has realized some of the benefits of a modular gaging system. Using low cost, off-the-shelf modular components, the gaging system is easily and quickly fabricated to suit most any part. Accuracy of the modular gaging system is +.00004-inch. When the job is completed, the modular gaging is dismantled and individual components reused for the next inspection job.

Kurt has developed a full CAD library of standard ATI modular component hardware, allowing easy design of gaging fixtures. In an era of JIT and quick change manufacturing philosophies, Kurt is successfully applying modular gaging techniques for better quality products.

Kurt markets this modular gaging as part of the "Kurt Check" system.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.