Experimental design techniques were applied to the task of characterizing the inspection capability of the machine vision component of an automated laser hole-drilling and inspection system for gas turbine engine manufacturing. The system uses a laser to drill very small cooling holes in gas turbine engine combustor rings and a machine vision component to inspect the holes. The machine is designed with a closed loop algorithm to adaptively control the laser drilling operation based on the inspection results. An experiment with blocking factors provided a disciplined framework for data collection to characterize the capability of the vision system component during the development phase. This experiment provided a better understanding of the system's capabilities and the user's design requirements, which has yielded system improvements.