Thread and plug gauges are handy for quickly checking parts, but what if the gauge itself is worn down? Now you’re incorrectly verifying parts! At China Precision Parts, we verify our gauge’s pitch diameter with our Keyence IM-7020 vision system.
Video Transcript:
“Hello, this is Andy with China Precision Parts Inc, and here is our quick tip of the day.
What we have for you today is a common thread gauge. What we want to do is we want to verify the pitch diameter is correct/that this gauge is not worn and can be used functionally. To check a part we have here a 3/8-16 plug gauge. We want to verify the GO size pitch diameter.
What we have here is a Keyence IM 7020. It’s a vision system, just with all the bells and whistles. To check your pitch diameter, it is very simple and very quick to use this piece of equipment. We can create a program from scratch. You have two areas that you can select from: wide field or high precision. For this particular instance, we want to use the high precision mode.
Center the part in the viewing window. One of the cool features here is the autofocus. Sometimes it works well, sometimes not. But at least usually gets you pretty close. We can always make fine-tune adjustments as we go.
First thing I should probably do is clean the gauge. We’ll take this off real quick for a minute. All right, now that we have a clean gauge we show you a few quick steps to check the pitch diameter major and minor. Object is in focus. We go to the app screen, [select] thread, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to draw a line through the center of the part, staying inside the first thread and ending before the last thread.
We expand the area to include the integrity of the thread. We have options here to what we want to report out. We’re just looking at pitch diameter, major and minor. Hit ok. You can see it’s going to report your major pitch, minor, and this is one we’re going to focus on right now, pitch diameter. 0.3344 If you can see on the thread gauge: 0.3344 So we’d say this is a good gauge to go. Give it to the guys on the floor, and we’re all set.”