Inspection cadence: what to look for at 1K, 10K, 50K, and 100K hits

The inspection cart does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be the same kit at every inspection so the readings compare across thousands of hits.

The minimum kit. A bright LED flashlight (cool-white, 800-1000 lumens) for raking light across the die face to make heat-check and crack patterns visible. A 10× hand magnifier or loupe for resolving the network from the propagating crack. Calipers and pin gauges keyed to the critical impression dimensions, with the gauge IDs written on the inspection sheet. A digital camera with a standardized lighting setup and a marked stand-off distance, so photos at every inspection are comparable to the photos from every previous inspection. A dye-penetrant kit (cleaner, penetrant, developer) for confirming whether a suspect crack is surface-only or propagating. The optional add-on is a portable surface roughness tester or a focus-variation 3D scanner if the shop runs them, but neither is required at this level. A portable Vickers or Leeb hardness tester is the right add when the shop is making pull-or-recoat decisions. Never use Rockwell on a nitrided or coated surface, because the HRC indenter punches through the case and reads the substrate.

The log. Hit count at inspection, date and shift, inspector name, the four readings at the four inspection points on the die (call them by their build-file names, not by description), photo file IDs, any dye-pen findings with crack length to one decimal place, any dimensional drift in millimetres, any maintenance action taken, any deferred action with the hit count it is deferred to. Sign it. The log is what tells the next inspector whether a 1.8 mm crack is new or has been there for 10K hits. Without the log, every inspection starts over.