George Schuetz: From Electronics Engineer to Director of Precision Gages at Mahr Inc.

George Schuetz succeeded Jim McCusker as the writer of the Gaging Tips column in the early 1990’s, and many of his columns still hold advice that is useful today.

I started out with a electronic engineering background. I chose to join a machining company that was making machine tools, but in a role on the electronic side, and that was my introduction into the machine tool world. I got to travel all over the country going into some pretty big shops. And it was fascinating, not only making the machine tools do what they wanted to do, but seeing what was going on in the making of those things.

Back at that time, Federal Products was pretty big in the world, and part of the machine tool installation process was to run the machines to make some parts and measure them and make sure the machine performed well. And that's when I ran across Federal Products’ name, using their gages to check the parts coming off the machine tools for qualification.

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The great thing about Federal was it was a pretty big organization, and they sold all different lines of gages. Some dial indicators and mechanical gages and electronic products and surface and form, all different types of industries. I was able to move from product group to product group.

Your gages are meant to do a specific function, but sometimes customers have issues with them. So you have to go into the field and understand what's going on and why they're not happy. You learn that most cases, it’s not the gage itself. It's usually that either the customer doesn't understand how to use it, or the environment is a problem.

Getting the field experience of being onsite, of having seen things being made, along with the gaging metrology background, there's a lot of application knowledge that goes into that. I was fortunate to get all those pieces from all the different areas and put them all together.

Gaging Tips was devised specifically for newbies to the quality world. I think at that time, quality was moving to the shop floor, and we were trying to educate shopfloor technicians how to be quality engineers, because they never went to school for that.

George Scheutz has been in the inspection and metrology market for almost 50 years. In this time, he worked his way up through Federal Products (now Mahr Inc) and served as president of the American Measuring Tool Manufacturers Association. Image courtesy of Mahr Inc.

The Tips articles are not high-level dissertations on quality. They're meant to be basic, ground-floor tips that could be used either 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 10 years in the future, and hopefully 20 years in the future. It's the basic steps and measuring things properly and getting the right results.

I think that's helped me a lot in my communications when I go to solve somebody's metrology problem, or solve somebody's measurement problem out in the field, realizing that you don't have to take the high-level approach. You have to start at the basic ground level and find out the root cause of the issue.

Tips that were were written 40 years ago are still tips that can be used today, because a caliper hasn't changed in its design that much. You still have to know how to use it. You have to be concerned about the environment and the people using them and and I think those tips are going to be able to go down for the next 50 years and continue to be used.