Quality

What Is Your Philosophy of Quality?

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, September/October 2019

What are your thoughts about quality? At one level this would seem to be a simple question to answer, but I speculate that if we asked that question of a large group of individuals, we would get a multitude of different answers. To most individuals, quality is subjective and may look very different at one moment than it does at another. Take, for example, the scenario of dining out. If the food is delivered to your table with a sloppy presentation, you may consider it to be of lesser quality than a dish that was presented well, even though the flavors and taste are still excellent. In this case, the quality decision is being made more on appearance than performance.

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Troubleshooting Common Quality Issues in Wire Raw Material

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 177

There are many ways that fastener manufacturers can make quality deficient parts. If one attempted to classify the source of all these different failure modes and quality issues, they likely would emerge with three or four general categories. One of these general categories and perhaps the single greatest contributor to end product quality issues is the quality of the raw material from which every fastener starts. This article will explore some of the most common quality issues related to raw material and seek to simply describe how each specific issue has an impact on final part quality.

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Why a Formal Quality Management System Makes Good Business Sense

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From Link Magazine, Fall 2014

On a cold night in April 1912 one of the world’s most enigmatic disasters unfolded, the sinking of what The White Star Line dubbed as the “unsinkable” ship, the RMS Titanic. Like many such events, discrepancies in eyewitness accounts, the passage of time, and the lack of hard evidence, has led to multiple theories and ideas over the years about what really happened. Suffice it to say though, the most likely explanation is that no one thing was responsible but rather many “small” things came together in the “perfect storm”. This cavalcade of events conspired against the passengers and crew on that fateful night to sink the “unsinkable” ship and seal its place in history as one of the all-time worst maritime accidents.

Although a hundred years later, we’re still searching for answers and one of the recent and more plausible theories that has been proposed has to do with, of all things…

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