Visualize being thrown back into a loud machine shop many, many years ago: grease-stained overalls and clanging metal provide a backdrop against which anything from automobiles to aeroplanes was built. What didn’t get sung about? These small, unassuming devices called thread gages. Buried deep inside the toolboxes of yore, their job was to thread component parts with accuracy.

Take a little journey back in time, say, to one of those days when precision was more a hope than a fact. The machinist, squinting in bad light, is trying to measure threads on a crankshaft with a pair of calipers. The cranky old calipers would squeak and send shivers up your back, like fingernails on the blackboard. It was like trying to measure your neighbor’s fence with some kind of ancient ruler-infuriatingly tricky! Along comes the lowly thread gage, redeeming all sins by bringing order to chaos. To us, though, these were rough tools-the sundial of our watch-carrying contemporaries.

The itch for advancement has scratched every nook and cranny of machinery. Now, we have gages that make those of yesterday look like Stone Age artifacts. Their design has become a fairytale come true for engineers spoiled for choice; digital gages, equipped with lasers, can break every boundary of precision. They allow for measurements so exact they would make a Swiss watchmaker blush. They are the James Bonds of engineering tools-slick, cool, getting the job done with flair.

Now, let’s assume this young, green engineer called Alex, fresh from the block. Alex wasn’t exactly keen on all the math that had to do with measuring threads. Who does? Numbers can sometimes be eviler than a cat refusing to come down the tree. But lo and behold, modern thread gages redefined that whole debacle. Our hero Alex now uses devices that give him the dimensions more quickly than one can say “Bob’s your uncle”. Like having a GPS, there’s no more arguing about which way to turn at the fork in the road.