Edge Finders

Or get a cheap webcam for a tenner, fit it to a suitable adapter (piece of plain rod same diam as an edge finder would do) and use it to make a "centering microscope" as per the article by myself & Dick Stephen in MEW around Jan/Feb this year.

Regards, Tony

I read that article, and very good it was too. But a PC and webcam won't fit in my toolbox .

Peter

Thanks!

Clearly in need of a bigger toolbox

Regards, Tony

I always woundered what the fancy sets are good for. I have one stepped (4 & 10mm diameter) edge finder and was never in need of another.

Nick

--Oops. Don't forget that in a pinch you can use an ordinary dowel pin and a cigarette paper..

Or a smaller PC :) I do wonder how well PCs and oil/metal shavings mix I was wondering about using a small security camera and a B&W monitor but have got no further than wondering about it :)

Brenda

-- anotheri

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Never heared about that, so I googled. The prize looks OK.

But am I right that you have to guestimate where the dot is pointing to? With an diameter of the beam of 0.1mm (IIRC) there is a lot of room to guess where the edge is, especially on a camfer. The Mfg says accuracy 0.02mm (estimated). Umm ... an edge finder can do

Reviews I found were -sorry- more hobby'ish.

Nick

monitor,

I've been very pleased with a "Planet" screwed shank centre locator. The spherical probe is £11.95 from J & L "Advantage", and the cyl. probe is the same price if you need one sometime. Very accurate in my opinion, and made in the UK,

All the best, Peter W.

They sure are Andrew,if you have enough time in your day to wait on them booting up.The last BT guy that was at my broadband line had one and he reckoned he switched the computer on,walked down to the carpark and got his van,back home and had a cup of coffee all while it was booting.In fairness they have a lot on them and they are reliable.Apparently the first job is to download his work for the day. Mark.

shock

carpark

I have a slow one that I use as the DNC interface to my Bridgeport Interact 1 running Win2K. As I turn on both at the same time, by the time the Bridgy has gone through its start up sequence and travelled the home switches the Toughbook is just ready to log on. No real problem as it couldn't work till then anyway, and so far it has survived all the swarf and coolant that gets splashed on it, not to mention being poked by a wet finger covered in curly bits of aluminium ! Only problem I've had is that the PCMCIA slots don't provide quite enough power supply current to the slots so not all wireless lan cards will work ok, but I now know which do and stick to them.

AWEM

BT ones are slow, not due to them having a slow processor, but because they run that much security (harddisk is encrypted, so every read/write has to be decrypted/encrypted). And there's no way around it, as it's even part of the BIOS. If you don't know the username and password, then the computer is useless. But the engineers toughbooks are due for replacement, and by the looks of things they're going to be getting PDAs, and all the old toughbooks will most likely be binned.

I've been introduced to the delights of using a bt toughbook this year for vehicle diagnostic software, and I can quite comfortably turn it on, enter the safeboot password, go make myself a cup of tea, and be back in time to enter the windows password.