Harbor Freight's "machinist vise"

How about making some brackets to attach 2 Harbor Freight digital calipers? No need to mess with the collars & you get Metric & English readings to boot.

Everything considered, the best approach may be to rig the table so you can use two of the inexpensive dial [drop] indicators for actual movement. Enco frequently has a sale for 0-1 indicators and the mighty-mag style holders that will generally work. You can always use the indicators and holders on other projects. FWIW this works well on lathes also, bot on the cross feed and as a depth stop.

Unka George (George McDuffee) ............................. I sincerely believe . . . banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. Thomas Jefferson (1743?1826), U.S. president. Letter, 28 May 1816, to political philosopher and Senator John Taylor

It is for positioning objects on the drill press, for pre-centered pre-marked holes, it is not for fine measurements. That's why it is so cheap -- and check the backlash on it too whie you are at it!!!

i who has > I bought one of their machinist vises a while back--the gadget that

Something about "if you put a pig in a silk dress, it's still a pig" comes to mind here...or perhaps "putting a Porsche engine in a Yugo"...

Ya wanna bother getting good screws, go ahead and build a whole new vise. The end result will be better, more educational and more satisfying.

It does not look like an accuracy issue, more like idiotic design or sloppy manufacturing process. The screws leads are different for no reason. The leads are odd ball numbers neither metric nor English. Pitch is not something you can improve accuracy, it comes from gear ratios, some knucklehead at the factory must have picked a set of change gear at random. They had a run of wrongly machined screws, they made matching nuts and sold them to HF. Next batch is probably all different again.

Mauro

I ran into similar Chinese logic a couple of years ago when I purchased several swing-arm lamps with magnifying lenses. The kind with a circular fluorescent lamp. They were well-made, the magnifying lense was well made and worked well for the assembly people. I thought I had made a great buy!

Then, one day, a lamp burned out. I got a spare from the store and commensed to replace the old one. Strange! the connector on the new bulb would not turn to fit the 4-pin connector. I got another spare and tried it. Same problem. I put the old bulb back in and the connector mated up just fine. Then I took the bulb from a second light from the same purchase and it worked in the first lamp, but the spares would not fit either.

I had to toss out each of the swing arm lamps when the bulb burned out. I concluded some factory in China had made millions of the circular fluorescent bulbs with the connector positioned incorrectly. Rather than trash the bulbs, they built swing-arm lamps to fit and sold them at really low prices to dumb Americans who would know the error until it was too late!

Paul

Dont bother. Just add a pair of those $10 1" travel dial indicators from HF. Works just hunky.

Gunner

"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them; the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."

- Proverbs 22:3

Or buy a Palmgren or a Yuasa.

Gunner

"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them; the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."

- Proverbs 22:3

Nah, it is, "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it still is a pig".

Replacing the screws is the only thing that will help. You might try Fastenal and see if they have any metric all thread of the right size to replace both screws.

Dan

The bad news is that Chinese manufacturers have a lot to learn, but the worse news is that one day they will learn it.

The easy work around to get the accuracy you want is to use a mag base with a dial indicator for each axis.

Ron Thompson On the Beautiful Florida Space Coast, right beside the Kennedy Space Center, USA