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Digital Calipers?

T

Thom Schuck

Joined
Mar 4, 2023
Messages
49
Likes
63
Location
Portland, OR
My Fellow Geniuses,
I need to pick up a nice set of digital calipers that I see a lot of dudes using on YouTube. The brand I see the most is Mitutoyo. Now what type of calipers by name, I dont know what they are called. I know what they look like but that would be like me describing a duck. Any advice and numbers sure would be helpful. The numbers I wrote down are 500-196-30. That is the style I am looking for. Not real expensive. I am a really lousy turner but I am getting better and I LOVE buying tools. Thank You Much!
Thom Schuck
Portland, Oregon
 
Hi Thom, I think your choices end up being in price range of Mitutoyo and up, and what can be found in the +/- $20 range at local hardware stores and outlets like Harbor Freight. My local home center chain (Menards) has 3 digital calipers available from $5.00 to under $20. Until you approach the "expensive" end of the price range, you'll find most of these tools come from China.

For my woodworking purposes, the Harbor Freight digital caliper has been fine. They'll all usually toggle between metric and imperial (displayed both in fractional and decimal). And they can "zero out" for accuracy. But they also tend to burn through batteries, maybe annually with casual use.

Not to dissuade you from digital, but @John K Jordan pointed me to these fractional dial calipers and I love them, and no batteries!
 
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Thom the trouble with most of the cheap verniers is that they use hearing aid batteries which do not last very long. the Kynup Digital Caliper on Amazon is stainless steel, takes much bigger batteries (comes with 2), has auto shut off and I've had the same battery in it for over two years. $19.99.

​

 
My experience with the cheap digital ones is similar to Bill's. Seems that every time I needed it, the battery was dead. Even off, it seemed to drain far quicker than reasonable. For this reason, a month ago purchased an analog caliper. So far, so good. Plenty of precision and it is easy to read etc.
 
I also prefer an analog caliper for turning. But at some point I purchased Wixey digital calipers from my local Woodcraft. Works just fine.

With my elertronic devices that use button batteries I leave the battery "drawer" partly open when not in use (interupting the circuit), and this greatly improves battery life.
 
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Thom Schuck said:
My Fellow Geniuses,
I need to pick up a nice set of digital calipers that I see a lot of dudes using on YouTube. The brand I see the most is Mitutoyo. Now what type of calipers by name, I dont know what they are called. I know what they look like but that would be like me describing a duck. Any advice and numbers sure would be helpful. The numbers I wrote down are 500-196-30. That is the style I am looking for. Not real expensive. I am a really lousy turner but I am getting better and I LOVE buying tools. Thank You Much!
Thom Schuck
Portland, Oregon
Click to expand...
Go with this option. It is very reliable and has a large screen. Our last set lasted 4 years.

 
I run several digital vernier calipers Mitutoyo, 160mm and 300mm. But for any general wood lathe I use a digital plastic body, as wood dust doesn't really improve them and the Mitutoyo aint that cheap down here
 
I have a couple of them in my shop. I just went to the big box store and got some. They handle metric, standard, tenths, and fractions. I can't read the dial type ones any more.... Ace Hardware here in Eugene, Jerry's.

robo hippy
 
A few of my herd.

IMG_E8313.JPG

The bottom plastic one gets used often on rough, dirty work. The next one up was liberated from a WW-2 bomber factory in occupied Japan. It is imperial on one side and metric on the other side and has vernier scales. Imagine an 80-year-old caliper that can convert from imperial to metric so easily. Very accurate and smooth, but hard to read. Other than the hard to read, I love using it, and it's not bothered by dust. Next is a cheap, no-name Chinese dial caliper that I bought 20 years ago. It is my most used since I'm not afraid of ruining it. It has some kind of gunk in the track and will only open to 4" or so. Than a variety of expensive name-brand calipers. All about the same and seldom, if ever, used. The top is a digital Mitutoyo, which measures to .0001, and it's the most accurate. I've had it 5 years and still on the original battery. It gets used in metalworking because of its high precision. It will measure really close to a quality micrometer.

I won't allow any of the cheap digital calipers in the shop as they go through batteries so fast and some are not accurate.

If I had to choose, I would keep the Japanese slide caliper and the cheap Chinese dial caliper. Glad I don't have to make a choice.
 
Based on seeing a couple recommendations, I bought an iGaging brand of digital calipers, after several cheap ones proved to be, well, cheap. It's tolerably priced. The iGaging is clearly a notch up in build quality, and the battery seems to be lasting longer. It also came with 2 batteries. That said, unless I need digital fractions or metric, I use a medium priced dial caliper.
igaging calipers
 
Steve Tiedman said:
Hi Thom, I think your choices end up being in price range of Mitutoyo and up, and what can be found in the +/- $20 range at local hardware stores and outlets like Harbor Freight. My local home center chain (Menards) has 3 digital calipers available from $5.00 to under $20. Until you approach the "expensive" end of the price range, you'll find most of these tools come from China.

For my woodworking purposes, the Harbor Freight digital caliper has been fine. They'll all usually toggle between metric and imperial (displayed both in fractional and decimal). And they can "zero out" for accuracy. But they also tend to burn through batteries, maybe annually with casual use.

Not to dissuade you from digital, but @John K Jordan pointed me to these fractional dial calipers and I love them, and no batteries!
Click to expand...
I use nothing but fractional dial calipers. Saves a lot on batteries.
 
I've had Brown & Sharpe, Starrett, and now a Mitutoyo. The B&S and the Starrett both failed within 3-4 years. I contacted Starrett about repair on their model and was told it was obsolete and no longer repairable. they offered to sell me the new version for something like 1/2 price of new. Instead I bought the Mitutoyo off ebay, no idea how old it was, but I've been using it for over 8 years now and it still works. I have to admit, the dial calipers are very useful and just as good for most uses.
 
If you want the best....

I have at least 5 Brown & Sharpe dial calipers. Swiss made about 200 bucks. The nicest feature is they don't have the thumb wheel which I hate. Number 599-579-4.

Several posters mentioned verniers, no, you don't want those.

Also I see the somewhat idiotic use of calipers to mark spinning blanks on the lathe in demos. Not a good thing to do.

Had a few digitals in the machine shop, the expensive ones, Mitutoyo, Brown & Sharpe, etc. Users preferred the dial B & S's. The digitals quit working if they get liquid on them, even those with a liquid proof rating. We put those in a drawer and found after a few years they worked again with a new battery.
 
Bill Blasic said:
Thom the trouble with most of the cheap verniers is that they use hearing aid batteries which do not last very long
Click to expand...
I read an interesting analysis of various digital calipers some time back by an electrical engineer. The summary was that the cheap calipers have terrible power management, while specifically Mitutoyo "does it right". Some of the bad ones not only have much higher power draw, they don't really turn "off" properly and continue drawing significant power when off and not in use. I have two Mitutoyo calipers which I use very regularly, and they last forever on a battery despite using vanilla SR44 (silver oxide) hearing aid style batteries. You can use LR44s (the alkaline version), but should prefer SR44s per Mitutoyo's recommendation – they have very little voltage drop over the battery's life vs alkaline, which works better in the calipers, particularly as the battery ages.
 
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