Cheap digital, or quality dial ?

[TRITON]

Im talking calipers.

The eyes arent as good these days and i find myself relying on a cheapo digital caliper, that as just after several years stopped functioning. So im in need of a replacement.
Would i be better getting a reasonable quality dial caliper, or sticking to the cheap and cheerful digital affair.

Who has what and what's your experience of them ?.
I do fancy a dial, but I worry its too much faffing about.

 

[Rorschach]

Cheap digital and buy a couple of them.

 

[pe2dave]

Cheap Digital and something with which to check them? an accurate metal block perhaps?
Or a metal block 'calibrated' with someones expensive calipers?
See this for a couple of options.
(Agree about the eyesight though - digital are much easier)

 

[shed9]

The iGaging EZ range seem to go down well with woodworkers. I had a play with one of them at Peter Sefton's shop and they are easy to read and certainly more than accurate enough for woodworking.

If you need them for anything beyond woodworking I'd be inclined to get a digital unit like Mitutoyo, Moore & Wright, Starrett, etc. They all do versions with clear digital display's although do buy them from approved vendors, there seems to be a bizarre trend to counterfeit mid to high end calipers these days.

 

[Spectric]

I brought a couple of Mitutoyo calipers about twenty years ago and they are still going strong, not cheap but in the long run good value. Compare this to the Trend digital angle protractor and my first one died within a fortnight and the exchanged one did not fair any better. You do want digital thou if your eyesight is not great, I struggle to read a micrometer these days!

 

[Jacob]

My eyesight not good but I still find the normal vernier scale caliper easy to read and with one big advantage over dial/digital in that it's hardest to make a mistake. Also cheapest, never goes out of adjustment or needs a battery.
May be a little magnifying glass would help, or a brighter light? I made a lamp stand to hold an Angle-poise which I can move about and project over the bench etc. Helps a lot. Using it this morning - planing to a gauge line I couldn't see without the lamp on it.
PS Avoid engineers calipers with 1000th of inch etc - they can get confusing, keep it simple!

 

[Cordy]

These are My Calipers
Excellent quality, no batteries required; quick and easy to read
Look

 

[JohnPW]

I prefer the vernier type, don't need batteries, lasts forever.

I find dial calipers slow and fiddly to read.

 

[John Brown]

I have two cheap (under a fiver, IIRC) carbon fibre digital ones, only good to a tenth of a mm, but that is way more precise than my woodworking.
I also have a more expensive metal one that has two decimal places, also digital, it lives in its box most of the time.

 

[D_W]

I do a lot with calipers (for making tools) - no digital stuff. Most of that is temporary. I want the calipers to be working until I accidentally physically damage them.

I have one set of import dial calipers and an old set of brown and sharpe calipers (the latter are better, but I don't like to bang them around). Most of the inaccuracy from the cheaper dial calipers (like when you squeeze the head and there's a one or two thousandth error on the dial) was due to the jaws having little burrs on them - I removed those with a fine stone by eye until the jaws close parallel with no gaps and suddenly the cheap calipers behave like expensive calipers.

 

[D_W]

(my first go at woodworking was almost all power tools with mostly digital readout stuff - that was pushed hard at the time, probably just because it's easier to get from overseas cheaply. within 4 years of starting, only one of the digital readouts that I bought still worked. I had one on the TS fence (stopped working in two years), a pair of digital calipers (stopped working in less than two years), two different "angle guides" (one lasted less than a year, the other one flashes on and off and is hard to use because it may flash off for five seconds, then be on for four - you have to constantly stop and wait for it).

I'm sure there was a couple of hundred dollars worth of junk. The imported dial caliper is something I had from reloading - it's about 20 years old now. Works fine.

Sometimes I wonder if the push for new products like that is just as much an attempt to try to get someone who already has usable gear to buy something else. The advertising gimmick for the digital junk at the time was that you can read it with bad eyes and analog calipers are "too hard to see". My eyes are going and they're still not remotely close to being the hardest thing to see in the shop - if you can't see a dial the size of a golf ball, then how can work details and small repairs be done?

(no longer have any of the aforementioned power tools - when I sold them, all of the trick fence garbage and digital read outs were pure losses. I'm fairly sure I had a digital readout for a lunchbox planer that was another $80 and never was accurate enough to use, and then the head stopped working, anyway).

 

[John Brown]

Well I've had my metal digital calipers for pushing 15 years, and apart from a recurring problem with bad cell contacts, they still work fine. That's not just because they live in their box most if the time, as that's only been the case for the last couple of years, since I bought the two cheap pairs.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

The only digital ones I've had always ate their batteries - usually at the least helpful moment. I admitted defeat and got a cheap oldy-styly one which is just fine for my fairly undemanding needs - as long as bifocals are to hand!

 

[D_W]

a couple of mine did that also, but I can remember which ones because it became obligatory to take the battery out of them if you weren't going to do anything with the machine they were attached to for a month or so. They drained cells even when they were off. The whole concept seemed like a great idea (like the wixey table saw fence). I haven't heard much about them since then. Battery was dead on mine about half the times I attempted to use it, and then it stopped working entirely ,solving the battery issue in a different way than I anticipated.

 

[TRITON]

Cheap Digital and something with which to check them? an accurate metal block perhaps?
Or a metal block 'calibrated' with someones expensive calipers?
See this for a couple of options.
(Agree about the eyesight though - digital are much easier)

Cheers for that, ill watch it later

 

[gcusick]

Even the cheap digital ones are intrinsically more accurate than mid-range mechanical equivalents. The design and manufacturing processes just lend themselves to producing accurate instruments in quantity.

I have 3, all Chinese, and, because I’m a cheapskate, none of them cost more than £15. Out of curiosity, I bought a middle-grade gauge block, complete with calibration certificate. Testing my cheapo calipers against it gave three readings within 0.1mm of each other, and of the nominal dimension of the gauge block.

So, digital every time. One comment though, look for one that uses a lithium battery (typically CR2032). There are many around that use an alkaline battery (LR44). In my experience, the battery life for these is very poor.

 

[D_W]

the stainless hardened bottom of the market dial calipers are $20 here, less 20% at our dive tool seller, so $16. The digital are the same price. It seems likely that the digital ones are much cheaper to produce at that end of the market.

There's no measurement that my dial calipers miss by more than a thousandth of an inch, but once the jaws got roughed up a little bit, they did read off here and there due to a false feel. Cleaning them up for a clean meet and recalibrating and that was that.

(there are retailers here that will also sell the same set for $50, but that's the way it goes for the brand loyal).

There is something spatial about a dial that is easier to understand than just looking at digital numbers. Derek may be able to explain that, bit time and space are spatial things to us. digital numbers confirm only one thing - the number. The spatial orientation of the dial and it's markings provide two ways to see things in the same measurement.

(I may have mild dyslexia, too - it could just be me).

 

[Sachakins]

Ì got set of Workzone hardened steel digital calipers from aldi. Been really good since got them 18 months back. Just keep spare batteries to hand, 4 for £1, easy to read, metric and imperial.

Just keep an eye on the diy sale weeks.

 

[cowtown_eric]

I vote digital for ease of reading, quick conversion (metric/imperial/fractions) use them all the time. All in one step. Even though I've got (mitotoyu /starrett/B&S )...mechanical calipers,

Eric

 

[Limey Lurker]

Take a look at these-
eBay item number:
333664281133
They seem to be the same model that Snap-On sell, very popular with aircraft engineers; they read Metric, Imperial decimal, and Imperial FRACTIONS, which, in my book makes them ideal for WW! HTH!