Understanding surface wear and its underlying causes is critical to the manufacture and maintenance of automotive and aerospace parts, such as bearings, seals, drive trains, shafts, brake components, and much more. Wear is extremely difficult to quantify—no single number can adequately describe how much a surface has worn, or to what degree this wear will affect performance. The advanced surface metrology and imaging capabilities of the Contour Elite™ 3D optical microscopes give engineers the ability to better understand wear and correlate wear to a particular manufacturing process or wear mechanism.