DRO Fitted

Well got my DRO fitted to the small TOS this week. I bought one of those Shumatech kits from the UK agent Lester Caine The web site for the DRO is at

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As these can be used for lathe or mill they have three displays X,Y and Z. On the lathe they are marked X, X1 and Z2 for use with the top slide or tailstock or you can even fit a rev counter.

I wanted to have the two bottom displays reading off one scale for a front and back toolpost.

Scott confirmed that it could run two readings and Lester offered to convert this for me. As this was working opposite to how Scott had his laid out for lathe with X and Z1 and Z2 I printed a new overlay up with Z at the top and Xf and Xr to denote front and rear tools.

As each DRO can be independently programmed and it's direction swapped it's easy to get the front and back to work opposite. Pic of the display at :-

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The 8" Chinese scale has been mounted in a milled out aluminium spar to protect it from damage and swarf. I have gone for holding the display unit and moving the scale, this way I get to keep a fixed lead and can mount the reader on the rear of the apron. There is an truck wiper blade rubber glued onto the bottom to act as a wiping seal. Pic of the mounting at:-
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Now to accuracy. Setting this to read in diameter mode I can consistently get this to read to 0.02mm or 0.0008" If I work in inches because you only have the decimal point to mark the

1/2 thou it works between 1 to 1 1/2 thou all the while. This isn't plus or minus it's all one way. So for anyone working in metric you can get better resolution and accuracy than imperial. This 8" scale is far better at consistent reading than any of my calipers and also the same scale worked by hand. I have come to the conclusion that a rigidly fixed scale is far more accurate than a hand held one from this. I have now used this commercially for two days now. One thing I have found is that I take a cut, measure and set the DRO to that reading, often on pressing enter it alters by 0.01mm. I then take another cut, remeasure and most of the time I have to reset as it's not correct. Once i have done this twice it holds the reading very well.

I have been boring bearings housings out today and I have been checking all the while. Every time I can hit 0.03 above size which is where I like to be and polish to final fit.

To say this is hobby end unit I feel that it's very close to commercial units and far surpasses all the other low end units.

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

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John Stevenson
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