As much as I enjoy a bit of time off it gets boring if I am away from gears for too long. Since I have been in the consulting trade the lull in activity at year end is expected and I try to make sure there is enough of a long term project left to keep me busy a few hours a day. Each year it seems like more of my clients are closed for longer stretches of time so a bigger stockpile of work is needed. Luckily, a rush reverse engineering project arrived mid-month and I found myself in need of some metric pitch gages as the New Year approached. One of our great advertisers not only had them in stock at a fair price, they actually had people working during the “holiday break” to make sure they got to me the next day. Gages in hand I was able complete my project and cross something off the things to do list. Unfortunately that project was the last thing on the 2015 list and I had to settle for college football to pass the time. Twenty sixteen is a blank sheet of paper and that can be a bit scary. It is the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the American Gear Manufacturers’ Association so you can expect a fair amount of AGMA trivia to show up in this blog along with recollections of the almost 45 of those years I have personally shared. As mentioned previously, our comments function has been handicapped by the worldwide network of spammers determined to capture every e-mail address in the world. [Gear Technology values its readers so all comments have to be approved before they are posted.] We want to hear your comments, concerns, suggestions, and questions though so please continue to communicate through e-mail or, if you can deal with the vetting delay, the comments tab.