Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E22 Dean Odell | Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T)
Aaron Moncur sits down with Dean Odell, a distinguished mechanical engineering instructor and YouTube educator, to explore the fascinating world of Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T). Dean shares his journey from a welder to an engineering instructor, discusses the importance of GD&T in manufacturing, and reveals insights from his popular YouTube channel, dedicated to technical education.
Main Topics:
- Origins and evolution of GD&T
- Common misconceptions about geometric tolerancing
- Practical applications in engineering and manufacturing
- Dean's approach to teaching technical concepts
- The importance of understanding design intent
- Inspection techniques and measurement tools
About the guest: R. Dean Odell is a distinguished mechanical engineering educator and consultant, specializing in Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) and Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) technologies. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering Technology from SUNY Polytechnic Institute and an A.A.S. from Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC), where he currently teaches courses in GD&T, CAD, CMM, metallurgy, and robotics as an assistant professor.
Dean is also a prominent online educator with over 32,000 YouTube subscribers, offering tutorials on GD&T, CMM operation, print reading, and metallurgy. Beyond academia, he conducts in-person training across the United States, particularly in GD&T and Zeiss CMM, known for his clear and hands-on teaching style. His work reflects a strong dedication to advancing precision manufacturing and engineering education.
Links:
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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Especially now if I make a video and I'm wrong about something, I'll never hear the end.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to another exciting, exciting episode of The being an engineer podcast. Joining us today is Dean Odell, a seasoned Mechanical Engineering educator and consultant specializing in GD and T and CMM technologies with a strong academic background and a popular YouTube channel that educates 1000s. Dean, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to our discussion on precision in engineering and manufacturing. Dean, thanks so much for being with us today. Yeah. Thank you so much. So let's, let's get to know you a little bit. Tell us about why you decided to become an engineer, and then how your focus eventually shifted to Gd and T and CMM coordinate measurement machines, sure.
Dean Odell:So I kind of backed into going to college and stuff. I really wanted to just use up the rest of my GI Bill. I was working as a welder at the time, and my company was getting more into machining, so I wanted to learn about machining at our local community college. And I got confused about the the names of the programs, so I signed up for Mechanical Engineering Technology, and I found out afterward there was Advanced Manufacturing Technology program that was just machining, which is what I meant to sign up for. So I did two years of that while I was working as a welder. I had some background as a machinist apprentice, and that was, I want to be clear, that was the title. It wasn't a state sponsored machinist apprentice program, but I had worked in the trades for a while, and like I said, I had about two years of GI Bill left over. So I was like, yeah, let me go to this community college. And, you know, use that up. And that kind of just went from went from there after that. I well, I have to remember now I was hired as a mechanical designer. And right after I finished my four year degree, and I did that for a while, and then I was hired on to where I work now at the college, same college I went to terrific
Aaron Moncur:Okay, and tell the listeners a little bit about what you're doing now at the college. So
Dean Odell:I'm a full time instructor at that Advanced Manufacturing Technology program I mentioned, that's what I teach in now. So I teach, you know, aspiring CNC machinist, mostly. I occasionally have a class in another program, but that's the majority of my work, mostly print reading, GDT, CAD metallurgy, those kinds of subjects I kind of specialize in, those for our trade students. All
Aaron Moncur:right, I have a question for you about Gd and T and machinists. I'll be honest, we don't know G and D, G D and T super well at Pipeline, you know, I think, like a lot of engineering places, environments, we understand the basics. You know, we can put a few G, D and T symbols up on a drawing here and there. But we're definitely not experts the way some people really are, for example, you and occasionally, someone on the team will suggest, Hey, we should really get some GD and T training, and someone else, this is the objection that I always hear, not just from pipeline, but from plenty of other engineering companies as well. The objection is, well, we could do that, but most machine shops don't even know how to read GD and T so what's the point? Well, I'd love to hear just your general opinion or thoughts about that, right?
Dean Odell:I've heard that a million times as well, and it's just one of those things. It just depends. I mean, good machine shops will understand GD and t just fine. Anybody doing high end work for defense contractors or medical device industry or aerospace, they know GD and T perfectly good. You know, people are picking it up more and more as time goes on. But I've heard that. And you know, part of it is the customer is always right. You know, if you go to a shop and they're going to triple the prices if they see a composite position, you know, if that's your only choice, yeah, you might have to pull the GD and T off the drawing. And as I'm sure we'll talk about later, you know, Gd and T is about design intent, so as long as the machine shop doesn't necessarily need to know the ins and outs of every single symbol, it's really, can they make the part correct, and then can it be inspected to the GD and
Aaron Moncur:t? So that's a really great point. Let's, let's just dive right into that. Now. What at a high. Level, at its most basic conceptual level, what is geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, and why does it exist?
Dean Odell:So GD and T is, you know, a language, and that's in the first page of every GD and T book, but it's really a language to simplify things before GD and T so I have a text or not, a textbook, a drafting manual from General Motors from the 1950s when they wanted to apply a geometric concept like perpendicularity, they would do it with a note. So it would say, hey, this surface needs to be perpendicular to this surface within this number. And for say, coaxiality, you know, that would be a note. And they'd have to write all this stuff out. And, you know, writing it out leads to problems. I'm sure you're very familiar with drawing notes. You keep them very short, because the longer you go, the more issues you can have. So early GD and T was just replacing these concepts that they're doing in machine shops. Anyway, one of them is run out, right? So the surface variation relative to axis revolution. Every machine shop that makes round things, it's doing that it's just putting it into a symbolic form that saves space on the drawing, because that was a thing back then, right? Everything was done by hand and standardizing it. So you go to y, 14, five, see what the definition for that symbol is, and kind of go from there.
Aaron Moncur:That's fascinating. I didn't know the history behind GD and t, that they originated as drawing notes, and the symbols were just a way to make it faster to communicate on a drawing. Yep. Very
Dean Odell:cool, and it's grown over the years. Early GD and T there's just a couple symbols. And you know, it's up to, well, it was 14. Now it's 12. They took two away, but, yeah, it just grows every 10 years they do a revision. You know, the standards get longer and longer and longer.
Aaron Moncur:Well, it's nice to hear that they're taking some things away as well. I think all of us can get trapped in that routine where we're just adding and just adding, and then whatever it is we're working on grows to be unwieldy and giant. So it's nice to hear that they're pruning things also being so thoughtful about it,
Dean Odell:right? Yeah, two commonly misused, concentricity and symmetry were pulled out of the standard. Now, I'm not privy to the committee's decision making, but it seems pretty clear that they just got sick of people misusing them, and that took them away.
Aaron Moncur:All right, let's talk a little bit about your YouTube channel, which has grown over the years and has a really impressive following. Now you have lots of subscribers and at least dozens, if not hundreds, of videos out there, mostly about Gd and T How did the channel get started? What was the impetus for beginning that, and how has it grown over the years? And what impact have you seen it have on engineering education?
Dean Odell:So the first video ever made, it's still up there, was like December 2018 and I was just a part time instructor, and it was just kind of goofing around. And, you know, I was trying. I made a couple of videos before the pandemic, but not really seriously, because it didn't really matter, once the pandemic happened, I decided to go fully online. And because of my experience in college, I really didn't like classes where you just, you're presented with all this stuff to read and just, here's a PowerPoint presentation, flip through it and write what you think about it, that kind of thing. So I wanted everything to be video. Every lecture I used to do in person, I wanted to be on video. So, you know, with limited success in 2020 I got that started, and then by 2021 2022 started to kind of fill out all the videos I needed for my classes, Gd and T is by far the most popular, and I have the most videos about it. But there's also videos on industrial relations, safety and health and manufacturing processes, and a couple other classes that I teach. So, as far as you know, making the channel, you know, it's an incremental process. If you go through and flip through old videos, I tried all sorts of different things, all different techniques for reading off a script or not reading off a script. You know, I did a lot of videos just sitting in front of a camera and move to a whiteboard. The feedback from YouTube has been pretty good, you know, the first couple years, nobody really comments. But now let's get like, 10 a day. I have to kind of read through and I do read them. Sometimes people have useful information, not not usually, about the technical aspects of the video making that I kind of have to figure out myself. They will let you know if the sound is bad or especially, oh, my god, the background music. People let you know they hate that. You know, I like it, so they got to tough it out. You know,
Aaron Moncur:did you? Did you expect the channel? To do so well, or was that just a pleasant surprise? No,
Dean Odell:I had no idea. I've liked YouTube forever. I think it's just such a great thing to be able to listen and learn, and it's got music on there. It's got everything. And I never saw myself as like a YouTuber, but once you know, there's a niche for GD and T that I kind of saw that I could fill when I was trying to learn it, the videos were very few and far between, so I kind of set out to make a complete free course where people could learn it from YouTube, just like any other subject, I had a dynamics class, engineering dynamics with a horrible instructor, who just was a first time teacher. It just didn't. Wasn't a great class, but I learned most of it off YouTube, you know, for studying for tests and everything. And I'll be grateful to that guy on YouTube that made those videos forever. That's how I learned everything in that course.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, what I know this happened during COVID, where online was, was really important. Was there anything else that compelled you to do this? Because it takes a lot of time to create these videos. It's not like you just snap your fingers and and there they are. Or was it really just COVID, and you needed a way to still teach your students, and that was online was the only way?
Dean Odell:Um, yeah, at first it was just, you know, hey, I want to make this for the pandemic and everything. But after I started doing it, I realized I was kind of good at it, so I just kept on. I mean, I could have stopped at a certain point and said, Hey, I have videos for all my classes. I'm done. But, yeah, I do enjoy the ecosystem getting that feedback. And, you know, I made a lot of videos about Gd and T before I ever went and got the senior certification. It really helped me to study to make these videos, and it's helped me understand GD and T on a much deeper level. Because especially now, if I make a video and I'm wrong about something, I'll never hear the end of it, I've got really cool people that will email me or DM me and say, Hey, I think you made a mistake here. I don't want to publicly comment, but it's kind of a nightmare if I get something wrong, so I've got to be more careful than I used to be in older videos where I could kind of spitball a little bit more.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, well, something else that has changed over the course of your video career is the hair. You had some sweet long hair before, and you look great now with short hair as well. But I just want to put it out there that I love the long hair, and I'm putting my vote in for a comeback of that long hair. Oh, thank
Dean Odell:you. Yeah, that was Oh man. You know, YouTube comments are 99.9% positive. The really nasty ones were about the hair, really, yeah, oh, man. People would say awful stuff, and I delete and block them. I'm not a free speech person on my YouTube comments, yeah, yeah, but yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed it. I had a guy that was going to make me a logo for free, and it was, you know, the hair or whatever, yeah, and I had to be like, Ah, I'm gonna cut it eventually. So I don't want to make it like, where I have to have it forever.
Aaron Moncur:Well, not that it really matters one way or another, but I was a fan. Thank you. The long hair that looked really cool. All right, what are some of the most common misconceptions that that students and maybe even practicing engineers have about Gd and T
Dean Odell:well, they think it makes things expensive, they think it's unnecessary. They think, I don't want to say it's too hard to learn, but maybe from an engineering perspective, it's like, hey, we didn't cover that at my university. So how important could it be? You know, we covered calculus. That was important enough to cover we covered fluid mechanics. You know, if we didn't cover GD and T, do I really need it to do engineering? I think that that is
Aaron Moncur:comments about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use probably 10% of what I learned in school on the job, right, and the other 90% are things that I learned after I graduated that were never taught in college, not the least of which is communication and getting along with people and organization things like that. Although I will say at my university, we did cover GD and T, there was a course for T as
Dean Odell:well. And I will give universities a break. You can learn GD and T on the job. You can't necessarily learn different differential equations on the job. So there are things that are better set in the university environment. You know, Gd and T, most people learn it. Most people learn it on the job. So, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:it's fair. That's fair. Something else that you have in your lab are a whole bunch of Zeiss, CMMS, and they go, you know, hand in hand with, with Gd and t, what? How did you. Was that part of the course when you started? Or is the are the CMMS something that you brought to the table? So
Dean Odell:me and my colleague were instrumental, and we had a couple, and we got a few more in the pandemic. And I think there's 12 in that room now. Yeah, that's a huge part of our program for machinists being able to inspect things, and, more importantly, be able to explain decision making when it comes to metrology, so that when they're getting their parts inspected and a metrologist, you know, tries to sell them a bill of goods, they can fight back. And you only really get that if you know how to program a coordinate measuring machine, which, which is a very important course for us, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, and doing inspections on a CMM, it's not necessarily black and white. There's some real training that goes into it to understand how to interpret the drawing, which is was, which is what you teach. If I were to use a CMM, chances are I'd probably get a bunch of things wrong, but that's part of your course as well. Is teaching students how to use these in the context of a print that is being inspected. Right?
Dean Odell:Yeah, as a CMM isn't as simple as just taking what's on the print and punching it in the computer. There's a good bit of interpretation that has to go on and the data you get. I mean, there's so much you can do with a CMM. You can take touch points, you could scan you could get a million points, or 10 points, you know. And it's just huge subject of stuff. And there's so many settings, yes, kind of like CAD, there's so many settings in there. And being able to kind of untangle it all is can be overwhelming at first, but I think it is an important part of the education of, you know, Gd and T and print reading is being able to take that to the next step. And we were talking about YouTube before I have a I have a good few videos about that, and I think people really resonate with the inspection part of it, as well as just the whiteboard. Hey, this is what this symbol means.
Aaron Moncur:Going back to the the videos, YouTube, what? What are some of the challenges that you've encountered, and do you have any pro tips for for solving the complexities of taking sophisticated, technical content and making it, you know, really accessible over a video? So
Dean Odell:I'll go in the context of the CMM videos I've made. You start from the beginning. So you make a video. Hey, how do I turn the machine on? Right? You got to start there. Then a video that's very simple. How do I qualify a probe and you build just like in the learning process? So in GD and T videos, I'll start with, Hey, here's some definitions. Here's the big picture, and then we'll drill down on this, you know, more minute topic. I'll try to just explain things in videos basically how I would. And in a classroom, the video format is great, because you can fast forward through things. So if I have an hour long lecture, the video version would be like 20 minutes, which I think is, I don't know if I was a student, I would appreciate that not to have to listen to something for an hour. He's just gonna compact it into 20 minutes. You
Aaron Moncur:cut out the non essential parts and just give the people what they need, right? Yeah, yep. You also do some consulting. And when you're doing training for a client or a client's team. How do you tailor those in person sessions to meet all the different needs that a different company or different teams might have? So when
Dean Odell:I do in person trainings, my style is on a whiteboard, just like the videos, and I've had companies when I, when I show up and they're like, oh well, here's, you know, the computer you can put your slides on. I'm like, Well, I don't have any slides. They give me a look like, Oh my God. We hired this guy. He's not prepared at all. Oh, right. But once I start doing the whiteboard thing, I really, I really, really like that method, because it forces doesn't force them. People are inspired to take notes, whereas with a PowerPoint, people are much less likely to take notes because they're looking at the slide. Maybe they know they'll get a copy of the slide that they're listening which is good, but the note taking process is really important for me, and an in person corporate training and whatever conference room they can get. For me, that's an important insight. Yeah, I found it really, really helpful. And like I said, the first hour or so, people are caught off a little, little off guard, because they're basically back in school. And how I've tried to relate it is, you know, go back to college, you would never take a calculus one class. Sites where they're just putting PowerPoint slides on the screen right your your instructor is going to be on a projector or on a whiteboard solving problems, and that's how I approach GD and T I don't want to trash PowerPoints because I know, for efficiency reasons. You know, other companies use them. And I'm not saying, if you're using a PowerPoint, you know, you might be using a whiteboard as well, so I don't want to go that far, but my personal method is just all all whiteboard. I draw everything out. I think people get something important from trying to understand what's on the board and get it in their notes. So they're thinking about it on a couple of different levels. As far as I'm drawing a figure putting a symbol on it. They're they're drawing that in their notes, and then they get to keep their notes and they're done. Yeah, and the other thing you mentioned tailoring is whatever a company wants. If they say, Hey, we don't use we don't have any shafts, we don't have round parts. But cool, I won't talk about run out, you know? We'll skip circularity. We'll just talk about the stuff you guys need. It's the GDT is a system in such a way that there are things you could leave out and still understand. You know, 80, 90% of it, terrific.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I'm going to take a very short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Learn more at Team pipeline.us and The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers, you can learn more at the wave dot engineer, and we're speaking with Dean Odell today. And speaking of the wave, one of the big events that the wave sponsors is PDX, which is coming up in October, the product development Expo. And we are so happy that Dean is going to be joining us there as one of our training partners. Dean, maybe you can just take a few seconds and talk a little bit about what you have in store for PDX or just general thoughts. Or maybe you have questions for the eventual attendees for your training session and you want to solicit feedback, but any thoughts or anything that you want to share there, in regards to PDX, sure,
Dean Odell:yeah, I'll be there. I'll go get a whiteboard from Staples, and I'll teach things basically how I normally do. I'm open to if your audience has any suggestions, it'd be my first time doing that kind of thing, you know, outside of a classroom, but I can talk GD and t all day. So if I have to put a sign on front that says, you know, debate me, we can. We can talk about whatever, whatever topic anybody would like to
Aaron Moncur:discuss, and you don't need any slides. It's all up there in Dean's brain. Yep, nice. If you mentioned that there's a committee who, every decade or so, they make changes to Gd and T, they add things, they clarify things, maybe they remove things. On occasion, if you were part of that committee, what changes to Gd and T would you make? Oh,
Dean Odell:that's interesting. I could get in trouble for this one. I would seek to simplify things by removing symbols, and again, I'll get in trouble for this. But I think circularity is kind of could be replaced by something else. There are certain symbols that are very easy to use, but it's hard to explain. Don't make a lot of sense. So flatten. Well, I don't want to say flat, perpendicularity, circularity, flatness. I could show that symbol to anybody, and they'd instantly understand, on a logical level what it does. And I think what happens is people who aren't experienced with Gd and T will kind of use those too much where they don't make sense, so they'll see a hole and say, well, the only thing I know about my toolkit is circularity, because it's obvious, or cylindricity, and they'll put it on the drawing. So I would reduce some of the symbols and use profile for more things. And yeah, I would try to reduce the page count. It's, it's gotten very, very long, and I know a lot of people work very hard on that, so I'm not saying their work is not good. I just think if there's any possible way to reduce the page count a little bit so it's a little bit easier, you know, more less unwieldy, I think that would be be good.
Aaron Moncur:I have, I don't know what year it was published. It's definitely out of date right now, but probably most of it is still applicable. I have a scanned copy of a GD and T pocketbook, and it's awesome. It's like. I don't know, 15 pages or something, and it's just like a really concise summary with a couple of basic examples of all the different GD and T concepts. And I love that thing. I'll go back to that thing, you know, over and over before opening up a Bible full of way more content than I ever want to go through on my own. Do you have any favorite GD and T concepts?
Dean Odell:Yeah, profile, profile can basically be used for everything. And the way I teach GD and T I basically start with profile and explain how it can be used to control flatness, perpendicularity, parallelism, all that stuff, I think it really helps people to understand GD and T as a system, to see how profile, depending on your data, references basic dimension, plus or minus dimension, how it would control form, size, location and orientation in different ways. So conceptually, I think that's a good way to learn the system, and after you have profile, you don't really need anything else. You can make an argument that position is a very special thing and well, I'm not saying you can replace position with profile. Position and profile, you have to have both, but you could essentially replace run out with profile. There's there's new dynamic profile allows you to do some things you weren't able to before. So yeah, that that would be my go to if I just, if I had to teach GD and t in four hours, I would do datums, profile and position, then I could get people on the right track. Great,
Aaron Moncur:great. Okay, I had a question that I just lost. What was it? We're talking about your favorite, your favorite GD and T concepts, darn. I've lost it. I'll have to come back to it. This might be the same. Well, it is the same because I was going to ask you, if you could only teach one GD and T Concept, which would it be? And you already said you profile datums, and was it position? Yes, what you said, Okay, what are some of the most commonly used GD and T concepts, and in your experience, should they be so commonly used? Oh,
Dean Odell:interesting. So I think what you see on most drawings is position, position for holes and cylinders, things like that. I think that's what people think about. First they think about position, bonus, tolerance, that kind of thing. The next would probably be flatness. You see a lot on drawings, if it's a kind of rectangular part, perpendicularity, and that's all in qualifying a datum reference frame for round parts, it's going to be a lot of run out generally, if it's a part that spins, and as far as you know, use overused. I think I touched on that before. You know, for people that aren't familiar with Gd and T, every flat surface, you might say, well, I got a I got to put a flatness on it right? I want it to be flat. And that goes back to understanding the concept. So rule number one is a concept that links size and form. So essentially, if you have a plus or minus dimension on a rectangle, the form of both sides is already controlled, and that's why CD and T training is rather important. Because if you, if you skip that and just go straight to the symbols you can kind of land in some hot water because you end up overusing symbols that aren't really necessary.
Aaron Moncur:The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer. That's P, D, E, x, p, O, dot engineer, going back to the fundamentals of g d and t, what can an engineer do with this tool with Gd and T that they can't do with just standard tolerancing. Like you, you know, you're eight inches plus or minus point two inches, right?
Dean Odell:Right? That's a great question. So they can get their design intent across. You may have seen a composite position control frame. It's the one where there's one symbol and two tolerances, right? It's the complicated, scary looking one, what an engineer can do with that. And the example always uses a light switch on a wall. You can control the two holes to each other separately from where the two holes are relative to the floor. So if you have a. A pattern of holes in any part. You can control things separately, and you can put that on the drawing. You're basically saying those two holes need to be a certain distance from each other, but they can be a larger distance as a pattern from the floor, and that's something that would be super complicated to do with a note. Got
Aaron Moncur:it. Okay, great. What is it that compels you to continue developing all of your educational content and mentoring the next generation of of engineers? What do you think it is that motivates you. So
Dean Odell:I've gotten this question before. I'm not, I'm not sure about mentoring the next generation. But as far as making the content just good at it, you know, when you find something you're good at, yeah, want to do it? Yeah? You want to do it more, yeah, there's obviously a need for this. So I just kind of, you know, keep going with it. Obviously, I enjoy it. You know, I've got your viewers can't see, but I got this from eBay. I'll read it drawings and drafting room practice 1946 as a book from I've had a search for it on eBay for years. You know, when you type it in you say, let me know if this pops up, popped up. I bought it within minutes. I bet that seller was like I thought that, you know what I mean, you sell some random thing. So yeah, I'm pretty deep in the game as far as GD and T and all that that goes. But yeah, genuinely enjoy it, and I happen to be good at it. I think I'm a good teacher. I'm not sure about a mentor, but I think I can teach pretty well. So that's basically it. Well
Aaron Moncur:when, when you have GD and T or or any kind of dimensioning and tolerancing on a drawing, of course, that that only matters to the extent that someone can measure it afterwards. What are the most common tools for inspecting a part based on the GD and T or the basic dimensions and tolerances in a print
Dean Odell:so measuring things on a plate, and I've got a couple of videos about this. You know, your best friend is a height cage, and it's one of those things that there's not very much information about as far as textbooks or reference materials, you basically have to have somebody show you how stuff works. And I'm no expert at plate inspection, but you know, you got to have somebody show you. Hey. You use, you know, this gate or this angle block to hold the part so you present it parallel to the height gage so you can sweep it. That's just something you wouldn't see if you just walked up to that equipment. It really is like a puzzle as far as all the 123, blocks and angle blocks and your height Gage, like, Where do I even start? I find that really interesting. And a lot of shops still have that equipment, and a lot of times you'll hear arguments. So you probably heard this before I measured in the CMM and got this number, measured it with a gage pin and got this number. You know who is right. So I find those, those arguments, very interesting. And that goes back to why 14 five and GD and t then to shout out, there's two other y, 14 five standards. Y 14.45 is the data measurement reporting standard. It's rather new 2021, and y 14.43 is the gaging standard, which has these awesome illustrations of gages for GD and T I think those are, those are both really good resources, if you are, you know, in the measurement game and you want, like, the official source on how this stuff is supposed to work. Now, for your audience, it doesn't tell you how to measure stuff that is, like the white whale, as far as some book that shows you how to measure everything, because, as I mentioned, everything is its own puzzle, right? It's nothing is going to be there's no standardized way to measure the position of a hole. Some parts are easier than others, but you kind of got to come up with it on the fly.
Aaron Moncur:How much does a decent height gage cost? Oh,
Dean Odell:not much, you know. You get them on eBay for 50 bucks. That's it. Yeah, I wouldn't say calibrated or anything, but as far as you know, one that's calibrated a couple 100 bucks maybe. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:all right, Dean, I've got an idea for you. I think that would make for an amazing training session at PDX. If you had a height Gage, and you showed attendees how to measure their parts. I mean, attendees could even bring some of their parts with them to the event, and you could show them in real time, in person. This is how I would go about using the height gage to measure this because, I mean, a CMM most kind. Companies don't have half a million bucks lying around to buy a CMM, but, you know, a few$100 if you can get a height gage and maybe a granite block right, that becomes much more accessible. And actually, as I've interviewed people attendees for PDX, one of the things that they have specifically asked about is, how do we do inspection without a CMM really, and this would just be, yeah, this would, I think that'd be a really cool training session, yeah,
Dean Odell:so I know it's an audio podcast, but on showing here, this is my little granite plate that I use for virtual trainings, the little height Gage. So, yeah, that's something I could do. I could see what UPS is going to get me for for mailing a granite plate. Maybe I'll use go to Home Depot to get some linoleum, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. Or if you can't find anything easy, I have a feeling that I know a company that could lend you a granite block for the event, okay, yeah,
Dean Odell:that's something I could definitely do. You know, I really like, in training to use real tools. I don't, I don't like, like wooden height gages, you know, the real ones are not that expensive, especially for training purposes. You know, could be beat up. It doesn't matter. But a lot of people, you know, go to university college, they never see one of these things, or they walk by it, but they don't know how to use it. So, yeah, that's something we could I could definitely, definitely do.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific, Yeah, terrific. All right. Well, Dean, anything else that you'd like to talk about or share before we end this interview?
Dean Odell:No, I think I'm all set.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, well, thank you so much again for being on the show and super excited to meet you in person later this year at PDX.
Dean Odell:Awesome.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
