bmta.co.uk
Accreditation
ISO standards are often revised and superseded and it is often
possible to continue to be able to perform calibration to a previous
standard. However, the UK assessment body, UKAS, stipulated
that:
“All UKAS laboratories currently accredited to perform the
calibration of hand torque tools to BS EN ISO 6789:2003 will be
expected to transition to BS EN ISO 6789 - 2:2017” and that all
laboratories will be expected to have transitioned to BS EN ISO
6789-2:2017 by 29 March 2019.
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In addition, UKAS stated that since there had been a “considerable
technical revision” of the standard, that transition to BS EN ISO
6789-2:2017 would require an extension to scope (ETS)
assessment. Assessment visits were to be arranged subject to
assessor availability of which there were only two in the UK.
Number of operations
Since the introduction of ISO 6789:2017 within Trescal was likely to
have a significant impact on the UK service if not successful, the
UK technical team worked closely with other Trescal Technical
Teams across Europe. We quickly established that other
accreditation bodies had not stipulated the same requirements and
time scales as UKAS.
Several countries were permitted to continue to perform accredited
calibration against ISO 6789:2003, others were still awaiting advice
from national accreditation bodies as late as November 2018.
Challenges
Timescale
The calibration services Trescal provide are often in line with ISO
standards, so when these changes, it is essential that we modify
our internal procedures and process and be reassessed within
given timescales to be able to continue to provide services against
that standard.
ISO 6789:2017 was finally published on 31 March 2017.
The ISO 6789:2003 standard required only 15
measurements in each direction to calibrate a hand
torque tool.
ISO 6789:2017 requires additional measurements to
characterise each tool type and record the findings.
This results in an additional 120 tests per tool in each
direction.
Without innovation, the new standard significantly
increases the time and effort required by an engineer.
A technician calibrating 10 tools per day may need to
perform an additional 1200 operations which on a
1000N·m torque wrench would require a significant
amount of effort, potentially leading to injury.
Time of calibration
If we assume an average calibration time of 15
minutes for calibration in accordance with ISO
6789:2003, then calibration to ISO 6789:2017 could
take as long as 2 hours to complete manually.
Failure to meet the deadline of 29th March 2019 would result in the
suspension of our accreditation and we would not be able to
perform accredited Torque measurement.
We had a potential 22-month project to achieve in 24 months. A
considerable amount of this time was dependent on 3rd parties.
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