ATEC11 offered explorations into GD&T in the form of two separate 2-day courses prepared by the ADDA, GD&T Fundamental Training and GD&T Application Training.
GD&T Fundamental Training
This course, presented by Dennis Schwartz, trained attendees with great coverage of GD&T fundamentals. It walked them through an educational approach to learning the ASME GD&T standard, as applied to engineering drawings. I spoke with one of the attendees, Kahlil Owens. Owens is a drafter for a local company in the Kansas City area. He is also attending ITT Technical Institute for formal education in the Drafting profession. Even though he had a lot of praise for ITT Technical Institute’s program, he said that GD&T isn’t covered very well within school. He found ADDA’s course at this conference to be intensive and important to the development of his career.
I attended the portion of this course that covered positional tolerancing. I found the presentation of the material to be well-paced. It was repetitive where necessary to help attendees fully understand and appreciate the use of GD&T.
GD&T Application Training
This course, presented by Luis Aguirre, was designed for individuals that already have an understanding of GD&T fundamentals. It engaged attendees to offer solutions to their own real world problems. Focus was on sharpening GD&T skills, making GD&T more useful, reducing costs, improved datum selection, etc. There was also discussion on the advanced use of positional and profile tolerances.