The pair of spiral bevel gears fabricated by Klingelnberg's cyclo-palloid method can be expected to have a good contact pattern because the gear tooth surfaces are fundamentally conjugate. In practice, however, the first gear pair having a good contact pattern is difficult to obtain because of the machine setting errors such as tool setting errors and workpiece setting errors in gear cutting. In this paper, an inspection method for detecting the machine setting errors in spiral bevel gear cutting in a Klingelnberg cyclo-palloid system is proposed. In this method, the coordinates of many points on the gear tooth surface are measured using a coordinate measuring machine and a geometrical gear tooth surface expressed as the functions of the machine settings is estimated by the method of least squares so that the surface can fit the measured data. The deviations of the estimated machine settings from the design values are considered to be the machine setting errors. The machine setting errors in gear cutting were detected using this method and corrective cutting which compensated for the errors was carried out. Consequently, more accurate gear could be obtained.