Low Cost DRO

Looks like the Sino which is available in the UK from Allendale

Tim

Yes, looks like a Sino, also sold as "Meister". But I wouldn't settle with just two axis.

Nick

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Hello there yes I,m familiar with this I've had one from the chap in Singapore been very happy with it the only thing is it's got to many trailing zero's but the features are good, the readout numbers are not as clear as a Mitutoyo but then you are only paying less than half the price, the fixing kit is about useless except for the screws, I fixed mine onto a Bridgeport 3 months ago and its been good and reliable one good extra feature is the memory as it remembers all of the settings when power is removed even if you move the bed it knows where it was last time. hope this helps I,m going to Singapore later this year and will definitely buy another system for my lathe. Cheers Colin

OK, where would you put the 3rd axis on a lathe? I could see it being an awful fiddle to fit a scale to the compound on a home workshop size of lathe, & adding an independent caliper-type scale is perhaps more practical for the tailstock.

For a mill I'd agree with you, one of the old Heidenhain scales on my mill is broken and they seem to be rapidly nearing extinction, so I'm looking towards replacing the whole lot with a 3-axis kit, subject to selling some other stuff first to pay for it.

Tim

They do a 3 axis one too, here

Oh, I forgot to say thanks for a useful response. Andy

Bear in mind if you oder relatively expensive kit from overseas that you can't be sure what extras will be added by the customs etc. here. In the worst case you might get charged import duty, plus VAT on the whole thing, plus about £8.50 by the Post Office for acting as 'customs agents'. Or you might get charged nothing at all. There's also the question of what happens if you have a fault. It'll cost you more initially to buy from a UK-based supplier, but it might not be more expensive in the end.

These units have more 'precision' than accuracy, especially in Imperial mode. The last digit is redundant and a blinking (literally) nuisance. There is a routine you can go through on startup to get round this, but probably easier to just put some tape over the last digit.

Tim

To the compound. Really neat if -and only if- the DRO can handle a swiveled compound.

Sino is offering small glass scales too. Haven't seen them in real. But they look like they are good and never heard something bad about their scales.

Nick

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What improvement in accuracy is achieved by using these chinese glass scales over the much cheaper chinese digital readout bar types? Fitting the bar type to the z-feed on my chinese mill made a massive improvement, but I can't see I'd get much more benefit for the extra money for a glass scale type.

Until I saw this post, I'd been planning to add readout bars to X&Y on the mill and plumb into a Shumatech display.

Steve

Steve, The Chinese digital scale quote 0.0005" resolution but that's not accuracy. In truth you can be plus or minus about a thou and a half.

Now if that is fitted to a lathe then that 0.0015" then becomes 0.003" because of the double radius thingy that lathes work in and that's a best case.

The glass scales are consistent at 0.0002".

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

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The real resolution is 1"/20480. But with a lot of jitter. The accuracy claimed is often 0.03mm for scales 150mm long. Even Mitutoyo o Mahr doesn't have better accuracy with that type of measuring (capacitive).

Nick