Calibration Services in Lake Forest

Severe-service valves arrived in April

IMI Critical Engineering opened a $38 million facility on Pauling Street in April 2026, moving its Control Components valve business — in Rancho Santa Margarita since 1987 — into Lake Forest with more than 200 staff across engineering, manufacturing, project management, quality and R&D. It builds severe-service control and isolation valves for oil and gas, power generation and nuclear.

Valve work of that class carries the heaviest documentation burden of anything in the city. Hydrostatic and pneumatic pressure gauges and transducers, dead-weight testers, torque wrenches and multipliers for flange bolting, bore gages, micrometers and calipers, gage blocks and surface plates, thread gages, hardness testers for trim and body materials, thermocouples and RTDs, flow meters, helium leak detectors and ultrasonic thickness gages. Nuclear supply chains expect every one of those to trace back to a national standard with stated uncertainty.

Seals, castings, eyewear and fusion

Bal Seal Engineering in Foothill Ranch holds AS9100D, ISO 9001, NORSOK and NACE, building spring-energized seals and canted coil springs for medical, aerospace, energy and robotics. Its core product specification is load-deflection, which makes force testers and torque testers the instruments that define whether the product conforms — alongside optical comparators, pin and thread gages, profilometers for seal surface finish, and milliohm meters for electrically conducting springs.

Dynacast on Commercentre Drive runs zinc and aluminium die casting with secondary CNC machining under IATF 16949, with CMM, X-ray and electrical, air and water leak testing in house. Oakley still designs and manufactures at One Icon in Foothill Ranch, where impact and optical testing to ANSI Z87.1 sits behind the product. TAE Technologies runs fusion research with roughly 400 staff — oscilloscopes and high-voltage dividers, vacuum gauges, mass-flow controllers, magnetic probes, thermocouples and an electrical metrology load most cities never see.

Herbalife’s 180,000 sq ft manufacturing plant on Crescent Bay Drive adds analytical balances, moisture analyzers, checkweighers, stability chambers and cleanroom monitoring. HDA Technology on Rancho Circle is an ISO 13485-certified medical device contract manufacturer. Applied Medical holds a converted manufacturing building on Windrow Drive.

Three different audit regimes in one city

Lake Forest is unusual in that AS9100, ISO 13485 and FDA 21 CFR 820, and IATF 16949 are all verifiably in force within a few miles of each other, plus the 14 CFR Part 145 calibration-traceability requirement that applies to the Panasonic Avionics parts and repair operation that remains in the city after the headquarters moved to Irvine.

The certificates those regimes demand look more alike than the standards do. Each wants identified equipment, documented accuracy and precision limits, traceability to national standards, and a clear statement of calibration status. We issue one certificate format that satisfies all of them: as-found and as-left values, measurement uncertainty, NIST traceability, and the ANSI/NCSL Z540.3 decision rule with TUR.

Small buildings, no in-house metrology

The defining fact of this submarket is building size. More than half of Lake Forest’s industrial buildings are under 50,000 square feet, which means most companies here are too small to justify an internal calibration lab and too regulated to skip calibration. They need an outside lab that covers everything rather than three specialists.

All nine of our disciplines run in-house — dimensional, electrical and RF, temperature and humidity, pressure, mass, pipettes, force and torque, gas flow and vibration — so a company with a torque wrench drawer, a pressure test stand and a bench multimeter keeps one supplier and one recall calendar.

The 241 runs from our door to yours

SR-241 begins at the 91 near the Anaheim–Yorba Linda line, about two miles from Richfield Road, and exits at Alton Parkway in Lake Forest. That is roughly 22 miles and 28 minutes with no surface streets in between, and our Monday and Wednesday route absorbs the toll. Bake Parkway and El Toro Road tenants come off the I-5 side instead; both are on the same run.

At that distance expedited calibration at 24, 48 and 72 hours is real rather than nominal, and on-site work — surface plates, chambers, production test stands, AMS 2750 furnace surveys — books with about two weeks of lead time. American Gage has calibrated from Orange County since 1968, under A2LA ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accreditation, certificate 4296.01, with standard turnaround of 7–10 business days.

Industries we serve in Lake Forest

• Aerospace & Defense
• Medical Device Manufacturing
• Valves & Flow Control
• Die Casting & Precision Machining
• Advanced Energy & R&D