Except for a couple issues...For the Calibration you get a report showing the date it was calibrated and nothing more. No data and no indication what was done (adjusted, lubed, parts replaced, etc). The Certificate shows you the As Found and As Left data (but still not what was done) so you can track whether your wrench is drifting--and that info is used to set how often you send it out for verification.
Oh--and Angle is not accredited so their certifications wouldn't be accepted by most ISO-accredited quality systems.
I've been sending them repair work for years because they are cheap & do a good job but it annoys the hell out of me that they never state WHAT they did.
I guess it depends on who does your calibrations. For my personal stuff I send out, I get a full report back with my calibrations. Date, range tested, pass/fail at several different point in the range, percentage error, and if any work was done. For the stuff at work it just gets a pass/fail sticker with the date of the test and the next due date. We do a lot of calibration in house.
With certifications I get as found results, full test results, and most importantly the calibration certification of the device used to calibrate the wrench. There is very little difference in the actual results received. Theoretically I could track certified result all the way back to a international standard in France if I was so inclined.
With certification, I also get a legal document that transfers some liability should anything go wrong to the company that did the certification and their insurance. For your average person, that is about useless. For a production line with millions of dollars of liability it can be critical. You have to prove that the instrument was the cause of the failure and everything else was done correctly and the failure was the result of the tool. In order to do that, you have to have a fully documented quality assurance process and every t crossed and I dotted. It can takes years and hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to complete. Not something that is important to your average home owner/mechanic.
I have watched that legal process play out in the ship yards a few times. It is fascinating to watch. One of the local shipyards screwed up a head job on a large diesel engine and ended up damaging the cylinder (each cylinder has its own head). Between the actual damages and the shipping loses, it ended up being a several million dollar job. They tracked and checked every tool used in the job, verified that all the people doing the work were qualified, verified all the QA points were done, verified the people who verified the QA checks where qualified, they checked the work spec vs the OEMs instructions, and even check if the engineer at the OEM who wrote the manual was a qualified and a PE. In the end, the calibration companies insurance ended up eating the repair cost.
