Without the Right Adapters a Force Calibration Technician is Nothing Short of Being Called a Miracle Worker

Think about that for a minute. Would you want a surgeon to operate on you with kitchen utensils such as a serrated knife? Then why do some people (management cough) expect or ask the force calibration technician to calibrate load cells, truck & aircraft scales, tension links, dynamometers, and other force measuring devices with whatever they have in their laboratory. Adapters that could range from unsafe, to an improperly machined adapter that allows them to fixture the force measuring device in the frame to apply forces and record output at those forces. You must ask why is this happening? Is it just that people are oblivious to the importance of adapters in mechanical measurements? Not using the proper adapters to calibrate load cells, truck scales, aircraft scales, tension links, dynamometers, and other force measuring devices can produce significant measurement errors and pose serious safety concerns. The purpose of this paper is to examine safety concerns with using older adapters and discuss some of the error sources associated with using the wrong adapters. We will leave the rest up to the reader on whether it makes sense to seek out the appropriate adapters and have skilled calibration technicians or simply hope the technician can maintain the "miracle worker" title. Though some calibration technicians may still wear the miracle worker hat when the manufacturer writes specifications that were achieved once and never repeated, but I regress as this is an educational paper and we will not be discussing unrealistic specifications. Instead, we will be discussing using the adapters that will give a calibration technician the highest probability of meeting those specifications.