ABSTRACT
Virtually all individual piece parts are made to be combined with other parts. The same is basically true of processed materials, such as, chemicals, plastics, rubber, glass, pharmaceuticals and many food products. The main thing of interest is the distribution of the important characteristics of the assembly or combination of the components, not so much the distributions of the characteristics of the components. This chapter discusses the statistics of combinations and tolerances for mating parts. It illustrates a simple case of additive and subtractive functions, the mean and standard deviation of which are easily obtained. Such functions are extremely common in industry wherever there are assemblies of component parts. The chapter also includes exercise problems related to statistics of combinations.
