Buyer Beware: The $10 Digital Caliper

Interesting, I had no idea digital calipers came in 10 thou resolution!

I bought 2 more of the $10 HF digital calipers last year. I like them & use them often, the cases they come in that is, the actual calipers I gave away. :big grin:
 
2nd on the disposable Harbor Freight $9.99 when on sale use the 20% off and you can just about throw it away instead of replacing the battery
 
I’ve had good luck with the Harbor Freight ones.
 
I have some old calipers which I love, and they always seemed very repeatable and measured correctly against micrometer standards... but...
The old maxim in machine shops was you can trust them to the nearest hundredth of an inch, but never do 1/1000th of an inch work. Use a micrometer (or if you are really old school) a pro-grade Vernier caliper. Debris can get on the rack, and cause some error in the pinion position.

Please don't come back and tell me about your calipers which are good to 1/1000th, I have several which would also fill that bill, but in the shops I worked for, the lead machinist would smack you if he saw you doing a 1/1000 tolerance part with calipers.
 
I had a supervisor years back that could read his scale down to the .001s , and he could build a tank in a week ! I told him , the older you get , the better and faster you were . :rolleyes:
 
I bought two paqirs of the HF calipers a few years ago. The movable jaw was loose on the beam which caused poor repeatability. In addition, the slide was rough. The cause of the problem was the beam was never properly finished and had high spot. A check of the beam width with a micrometer showed the location of the highs and careful stoning of them brought the beam width into uniformity. Additionally, I polished the beamsliding surface. An adjustment of the gib via the two adjustment screws on the top of the beam completed the job. The calipers now consistantly agree with my micrometers.
 
Papa Charlie said:
....
Still don't know why the would advertise the EU only play units here, you would need a DVD made in EU that has the decoder to read it. Oh well, live, learn and slow down. (Note to self)
Click to expand...

No, any DVD player *can* play them, they just *won't*. The movie studios insisted on DVDs having something called a region code. Generally that corresponds to Europe, the US, Asia, etc. You can buy multi-region DVD players that will ignore the region code. Sometimes there's also a setting on the DVD player that lets you change what region code is allowed, but that's much less useful, especially since that sort of DVD player typically only lets you change the region code a handful of times.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 
If you purchase your DVD player from a Military PX, it is more likely to support multi-region disks, as Soldiers/Sailors/Airmen/Marines use disks from around the world while travelling. I salvaged and repaired a PX player when I was in Iraq, it supported all Regions, but I had to select the region in the Menu.
 
It's funny how my taste/need in digital calipers have changed since slowly building my machining repertoire. 15 + years ago I found this place called Freight and Harbor, maybe you've heard of them? Seriously though, back then, no one around here heard of them. I got a set that were affordable. About 6 years ago I started learning the short comings and have slowly amassed a big set of (mostly) crappy calipers. I do have a Husky set that does fractions...I kinda dig that as the whole imperial thing is pretty convoluted to me.
I really try to use micrometers now when possible, but I'm OVER the cheap caliper thing no matter the convenience.
*edit
After posting here, I went to YouTube...What pops up? Yeah,I'm being "tracked". Anyway, That same caliper was in this "roundup" and its actually pretty interesting....
Caliper roundup
 
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Thanks for sharing that YouTube video. Interesting.
 
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