Cheap digital calipers... and even cheaper versions

[VicHobbyGuy]

You know this story already.....
I've been using a set of 'Daniu' 6" metal digital calipers for the past couple of years. I bought them from Banggood and with the shipping from China they were about $29CAD. They work OK, don't eat batteries and are comfortable in the hand.
https://www.banggood.com/DANIU-150m...-Zero-Buttons-p-1155851.html?cur_warehouse=CN
I have older and longer Mitutoyo digital calipers which are nicer, but the display is smaller. If they were shorter I might use them more, but they just sit on the shelf most of the time.

I decided to buy a second set of 'Daniu' calipers, but before I hit the 'buy' button I thought I'd look on Amazon to see if there was something 'the same' with a shorter delivery time. Sure enough, I found something that looked identical, at a cheaper price, too! And with quick 'free' delivery, since I pay monthly to Amazon for that.
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08J2R5Q6B?th=1

The Amazon calipers arrived an hour ago. Two seconds after I picked them up, I knew they were different from the Daniu version. Sharp edges throughout - they felt and looked like Daniu's which had skipped the final machining and finishing steps. Also the display is different; even the screws on the battery compartment are a bit larger and cruder. It's hard to get pictures which show the difference.


There's no particular 'moral to the story' - no surprise, you sometimes get what you pay for, there are serviceable tools available cheaply, and the cheaper Amazon calipers would be OK for something like a DIY indicator on a lathe (the reason I ordered them). But for a few dollars more, something which feels good in the hand can be a better value.

 

[mac1911]

You know this story already.....
I've been using a set of 'Daniu' 6" metal digital calipers for the past couple of years. I bought them from Banggood and with the shipping from China they were about $29CAD. They work OK, don't eat batteries and are comfortable in the hand.
https://www.banggood.com/DANIU-150m...-Zero-Buttons-p-1155851.html?cur_warehouse=CN
I have older and longer Mitutoyo digital calipers which are nicer, but the display is smaller. If they were shorter I might use them more, but they just sit on the shelf most of the time.

I decided to buy a second set of 'Daniu' calipers, but before I hit the 'buy' button I thought I'd look on Amazon to see if there was something 'the same' with a shorter delivery time. Sure enough, I found something that looked identical, at a cheaper price, too! And with quick 'free' delivery, since I pay monthly to Amazon for that.
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08J2R5Q6B?th=1

The Amazon calipers arrived an hour ago. Two seconds after I picked them up, I knew they were different from the Daniu version. Sharp edges throughout - they felt and looked like Daniu's which had skipped the final machining and finishing steps. Also the display is different; even the screws on the battery compartment are a bit larger and cruder. It's hard to get pictures which show the difference.
View attachment 481026View attachment 481027View attachment 481028View attachment 481029

There's no particular 'moral to the story' - no surprise, you sometimes get what you pay for, there are serviceable tools available cheaply, and the cheaper Amazon calipers would be OK for something like a DIY indicator on a lathe (the reason I ordered them). But for a few dollars more, something which feels good in the hand can be a better value.

I think what hapoens a lot is a “brand” goes to manufacture and says I want X million of these made up with our logo and do a bit of finishing up on them. When the run is over the manufacture uses all the left overs and ships them out good or bad? I have some dirt cheap cals and other than batterie issues they work for the needed task.

Thats what it comes down to.
I know my skill set and out come so going beyond say Central or Igauge tools is not cost effective.

 

[VicHobbyGuy]

Thats what it comes down to.

I agree.
I couldn't wait even the couple of days for these calipers to be delivered, so I used a set of even cheaper plastic ('carbon fiber' - right! ) calipers I had on hand for my 'tailstock DRO' project. If returning them had been a hassle, I'd probably have spent some time with the Scotchbrite and fine sandpaper to take off the rough edges. But I don't need them, and I can spend that $20 on something else (that I also don't really need.. )

 

[mac1911]

I agree.
I couldn't wait even the couple of days for these calipers to be delivered, so I used a set of even cheaper plastic ('carbon fiber' - right! ) calipers I had on hand for my 'tailstock DRO' project. If returning them had been a hassle, I'd probably have spent some time with the Scotchbrite and fine sandpaper to take off the rough edges. But I don't need them, and I can spend that $20 on something else (that I also don't really need.. )

I have a set if the carbon fiber ones…carbon fiber vinyl wrap , lol They live in the top draw and are used for the quick dirty work like exhaust or hose sizing where close enough is good enough.

 

[Jake M]

I use calipers at work a lot, in a repair shop/light fabricating environment, so "things" happen to my calipers sometimies. So I know about cheapies, and I know about the value of absolute accuracy. Here's a brief overview of my experience.

I recognize those calipers in the first post. Not either name, but that design, with CLEAR indications that they came from the same "blueprints", but were blessed with a few artistic liberties to be most efficiently produced in different factories. (Remember, China does not recognize tradmarks, patents, intellectual property, or generally the ownership of any design, any idea, or any of that. Copying is legal there.) Outward appearance doesn't mean a lot. And things get updated over time. So even the SAME caliper from the SAME factory with the SAME brand and the SAME part number, might or might not be what it was the last time.

Anything under fifty bucks, you can pretty much guarantee is not great, and is "probably" not consistent. You might get lucky and get a good one if you bought three, but as a rule, with that price cap, (And staying with the the electronic/digital/0.001 inch or better resolution) they're pretty much the same.

There is some pretty useful, "kind of" consistant stuff in the 50 to 70 dollar range. (And also some junk to weed out that is camouflaged by simply sticking a higher price on a ten or twenty dollar piece.) That's where you start to find a set that rolls smoothly, (including having the roller....), repeats pretty well from inside to outside, can be trusted for absolute measurements over a good part of it's scale.

A GOOD caliper, that you can trust solidly for both accuracy and repeatability, inside and out, and will repeat to it's self or several of it's brethren over most or all of it's range, those start well over a hundred bucks, and only goes up from there. And again, you're gonna have to weed out the ones that are camouflaged by an artificial price, and at that range, you're looking for name brands, which means weeding out straight up counterfeits at the same time.



In my opinion, (and in the spirit of the original post), my take is that the absolute best caliper you can have is the one that does the job at hand. Some of the cheaper ones are great if you really don't care about the last digit or two. Or if you want to scribe with them. Or grind the jaws down to measure something they weren't meant to measure. Stuff you'd never to to a precision too. I've got several of those, and it's nice to know that you don't have to give a crap about them if you don't want to. The mid grade ones are great if YOU are doing a project, using ONLY that tool to measure all of the parts. (Provided that the ID and the OD measurements match up OK, or the error is consistant enough that you can account for it). That'll let you make pretty good parts as a rule, especially if you've got proper micrometers to back them up when needed. If you need your measurements to match something else, that WASN'T made based on your preferred caliper- Well, then you need to stop being lasy and use real tools then you're into absolute numbers, and real money, and limiting yourself to the higher end, name brand, probably not Chinese options which are made to an accuracy that supports what can reasonably be done with a measuring tool of this type.
Having a couple to choose from moving from one task to another is not a bad thing....

 

[Pevehouse]

I have been using a set of Niko off of Amazon that seem to hold up well. They are not absolute but they do read in fractional as well, for the lazy people like me,lol. MSC has a good deal on mitutoyo 6” absolute at the moment. Im thinking of pulling the trigger today

 

[Jake M]

,,, they do read in fractional as well, for the lazy people like me,lol,,,

What the heck, I'm gonna throw out another one here with no real point, and just a reflection... I've got a set of Harbor Freight fractional dial calipers at work. (30 bucks I think? Not the cheapest dial you can get, out of the whirlpool, but still well inside the toilet bowl....) I got them literally to make a scribe out of. The dial makes ONE revolution per inch. (As opposed to 10 revolutions per inch for a typical 0.001 caliper), which is all the resolution you need to work comfortably to 1/128 of an inch. (It reads directly to 1/64, and the graduations are PLENTY wide enough to infer half of that for 1/128 if that was ever pertinent, which I have never had a use case for in my life....). And if I'm only working to a half, quater, eighth, sixteenth, thirty second, sixty fourth. So easy to do at a glance. As soon as I got them opened up, I decided right then and there that I'd never have a digital fractional caliper again. If I'm working from quarters eighths, sixteenths, my brain can break up that dial any way that's appropriate, and I've never got to work back from 128ths to find the appropriately "less accurate" number that I'm working to. I do scribe with them, but I never did shorten a leg, I like 'em too much. It's got a 0.01 (one one hundredth of an inch, ten thousandths) dial around the outside too for quick conversions if you need that. Zero good for machining (well, maybe one or two good, but not three or four good. Better than a tape measure). But for building/fabricating... Plenty of overkill for stuff that's gonna come off of a chop saw and get welded to something es that was probably not even that accurate from new... Decimal numbers lend themselves to digital displays, but fractional numbers are just so much better on an analog display. IF you choose or are stuck with fractions, or as you mentioned, identifying material to a "nominal" size that's plus or minus a mile to a machinist... What a pleasure that cheap heap o' crap is to use.

 

[VicHobbyGuy]

About display options, fractional, dial vs digital, etc.. it is interesting to me that I have gotten a bit 'set in my ways' even with things I've only been using a lot for a few years. Though I've had cheap digital calipers around for a long time, I used them mostly for woodworking and general shop stuff like measuring fasteners. Getting a lathe and making stuff that had to fit (more-or-less) changed my outlook.
I recently bought a second set of those 'better' 'Daniou' calipers I mentioned in my original post. They display four decimal places (supposedly to the ten-thousandth) in 'inch mode' - which I really don't like. I think I'd gotten accustomed to just looking at the last 3 digits. And some plastic calipers I have just display to the hundredth of an inch. Like Muddy Waters said "I just can't be satisfied" ...

 

[VicHobbyGuy]

So even the SAME caliper from the SAME factory with the SAME brand and the SAME part number, might or might not be what it was the last time.

Absolutely. I bought another supposedly identical 'Daniu' caliper to the ones I show in the first post, from the same online site, and it displays more decimal places.

 

[graham-xrf]

I opened this Pandora's box in another thread a few years back. I won't buy the junk stuff again.

Nor need I head straight for Mitutoyo - though there is the added hazard that if bought from eBay, or Amazon, or AliExpress, it might look like a Mitutoyo, and have a price way more expensive than the usual budget ones, but still be a counterfeit!

I have been through 3 junk caliper and 2 quality caliper purchases. One I returned as not fit for purpose. I got a refund, but they didn't want it back. I still eye the metal bits, wondering if any part can become "useful" in a project. Of the remaining low cost ones, I gave one away, and the last lurks somewhere, unused.

I have stripped these things down to the bare circuits, and I discovered that there are basically two methods of measurement. The one you know, and have come to hate, present in all the cheapo versions, and the "other" kind, which have absolute encoding using a different fundamental principle. This latter type do not have to be constantly set-zero checked, nor slip their origin if you close them quickly, or have them land hard. Think Mitutoyo, and iGaging. The other property you should get picky about is how accurate they are when set out at 120mm, instead of 25mm. The cheap one's can't do it!

The iGaging OriginCal are the ones I now use, and I have two of them. They cost me about £55 (about $70), though the price may have moved on some in a couple of years. The only feature about them that could be better is the ones I have do not automatically turn off, though that said, they don't seem to care if I forget for a couple of days. All still on original batteries. In actual function, I would rate them at, or near Mitutoyo class. I think there are at least a few others