First Article Inspection

First article inspection the act of comparing a physical sample part with the specifications (usually a detail drawing, or blueprint) against which it was made. The sample is usually one of the first parts made from a tooling or a setup. Each specification dimension is measured on the physical part, compared against the print, and a list constructed of which dimensions were met and which weren’t. For a simple part, this list is quite small. But for a complex part the list of dimensions can be extremely long and the inspection quite involved. By definition, any dimension that appears on the print must be measured on the part and listed in the report.