Digital Callipers

im my experiance of "Cheap" verniers, its best to avoid them like the plague, you are much better off getting a mighty yo-yo (mitytoyo) from somewhere like J&L for about £45.... i got mine years ago, when they were still nealy £100 and its still going strong, i have seen colegues at work with cheepo ones haveing to replace then every year or so, it has to be a false economy... doesnt it?

Thaty said, i am a bit of a snob as far as tools go, my philosophy is, if i am going to buy it.. i will buy as close to the best as i can that way, i hope to only buy a tool once in my life time. because, if they are looked after they will certainly out last the owner.

When you get the Mitutoyo, get the dial-gauge version!

I think that for occasional use they would be fine, and I'd buy one if I didn't already have a Mitutoyo dial-gauge caliper on my desk.

Although we use a digital one at the factory, I still have a sneaking preference for the mechanical one, and will probably go for another like it when it falls off its perch.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Engine pages for preservation info:

I have both good ones and cheap ones here and can't see any difference between them. What you have to realise though is they are only good for about a thou and a half accurately and repeatable even the Mitutoyo ones. Forget the sales blurb about plus or minus 1/2 a thou. It all depends on how you hold them, how much pressure and how steady you are on the day.

I use these just for getting close or general work were a couple of thou doesn't matter. Accurate work such as bearing surfaces are always finished using a micrometer.

And as Boo said replacing cheap ones doesn't feel half as bad. The very first set I bought was a set of Max-Cal's because at that time the Mitutoyo's could measure in inches or metric but not swap between the two and the Max-Cal's could. These cost me £120 when a weekly wage was about £60.00, so two weeks wages. I did manage to keep them a long while before they died but a friend had a pair crushed in the traverse of a lathe when only a couple of weeks old - ouch.

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Not really - if you factor in the possibility of dropping an expensive one and breaking it then cheap tools are like cheap cars : view them as disposable and use them till they're shagged out. Better than being precious about them IMO, and of course the cost savings mean you can afford a fuller set in the first place.

Just another viewpoint, I'm not trying to start WWIII here ;-)

and i can see your point of view,

but surely, if you pay more you get more? as far as dropping a vernier goes.... that is sacralige, no matter what the cost is, i would look after a lesser cost tool in exactly the same way, they are after all, still precision instruments that need to be looked after to sty accurate.

i think we should agree to dissagree on this issue

(AFAIK - if they're the same as the Lidl ones of a few weeks back) They're the usual cheap "clone" of the Mitutoyo model. Typically retails in shops for £20-£30, so under £10 is a good UK price. The wooden case might be worth a tenner given what some places charge for that sort of thing :-).

Don't expect outstanding battery life from them. But, at the price, they're cheap enough to be useful when your best measuring equipment might otherwise suffer damage.

- Nigel

I've got a cheapo Rolston dial caliper that is accurate and reapeatable to half a thou at 3" (3" and 3.0005" test bars) which is more that my mates digital is. That won't event consistently see the half thou.

I used to have a 5mm per revolution mighty yo-yo dial vernier, it was very good, but when one of the aprentices descided to break it for me i was a little gutted, i looked and looked for a new 5mm per rev vernier, but for some reason mighty yo-yo were then only making 2mm per rev, which i found difficult to read and easy to make a mistake on, hense, i got the company to buy me a nice shiny new digital one, that was a good few years ago, and it still passes external calibration every year, with no problems.

to be honest i am not too sure about repeat-ability of the digi ones, i never use them for anything that close, anything that has to be closer than ±0.1 gets mic'd...... vern isnt the best thing to use all the time.

I've a Mit digital "vernier" and a Kennedy - for all intents and purposes they are identical apart from the name and price - good to 3 and a half decimals. They both read exactly the same anywhere across full scale. The cheap one has packed in several times due to be drowned in coolant - dried out it's back as good as new. If I want to be really finicky I get out the Browne and Sharpe "coolant proof" digital caliper

- good for 5 decimals.

In the real world the cheapo gets used 99.99% of the time!