Experimental design techniques were applied to the task of characteriz
ing the inspection capability of the machine vision component of an au
tomated laser hole-drilling and inspection system for gas turbine engi
ne manufacturing The system uses a laser to drill very small cooling h
oles in gas turbine engine combustor rings and a machine vision compon
ent to inspect the holes. The machine is designed with a closed loop a
lgorithm to adaptively control the laser drilling operation based on t
he inspection results. An experiment with blocking factors provided a
disciplined framework for data collection to characterize the capabili
ty of the vision system component during the development phase. This e
xperiment provided a better understanding of the system's capabilities
and the user's design requirements, which has yielded system improvem
ents.