"Good Enough" Vernier Caliper

Hey all,

I am looking for recommendations for a Cheap, "Good Enough" Digital Vernier Caliper available in the UK. Just something to help me get my prints dialled in and to check the accuracy.

I bought digital calipers at my local tool shop for about £16 and they have been entirely adequate. This one [www.ebay.co.uk] looks like the same model.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Looks just like the Draper Expert, I'll check my local tool shops and see what they have. Do you think its worth just getting the cheapest and see how it goes, How accurate do they have to be for 3d printing anyway?

I got a cheap one, it's great!

I got some from Lidl and they work just fine, 0.4mm drill bits measure up at 0.4mm etc...

They've been reliable, solid and accurate and cost less than £10.

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DjDemonD
I got some from Lidl and they work just fine, 0.4mm drill bits measure up at 0.4mm etc...

They've been reliable, solid and accurate and cost less than £10.

Which they had them at the moment as I can see lidl out the window of my office right now.

That's funny I'm sure mine where from Lidl too, Powerfix Digitaler Messschieber, no mention of china anywhere, so possibly made in germany?

If you want to see if Lidl have them you might have to walk over the road, looking from afar wont help
or on-line, there's always a few surprises in the tool section.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2015 09:27AM by MechaBits.

Note that "vernier" refers to the way they're read. So, digital calipers aren't vernier calipers by definition.

and digital vernier calipers where not invented by Pierre Vernier, but they are good enough, unless you want old school.

get a manual one and learn how to read it its far better as you will be pretty sure it is that distance. its easy to get used to it just grab random stuff and start reading them. after a few tests it will become second nature and you know that the distance you are measuring is the real one.

i have a German made one, it costed more the 10 Euro but its very accurate if you handle it gently.

Timi,

I have both types - and invariably I pick up a digital one rather than the mechanical ones. Mind you, I have an expensive Mitutoyu digital caliper as well as the cheap one. The Mitutoyu lives in the house, and the cheapo on the garage bench... but both will give a decent accuracy (good enough for my work, anyway).

The biggest advantage of the digital caliper is that you can swap between inches and metric at the press of a button - I think in metric but my lathes are ancient ones with imperial scales, so it's really useful to be able to set up the caliper at a particular metric measurement, then press the button and use imperial on the machine. Saves a lot of head-scratching and reduces the potential for mistakes.

Wow $148.40+ for the caliper, i see why you keep it in the house. for that price you get the electronics of the prusa i3.
Well i am way cheaper then you i keep mine in the box it came with, and very lightly oiled just in case. i got mine around 25 Euros it was stock in a shop and he wanted to get rid of it i guess.

I've seen cheapo digital calipers that only read down to 0.1 mm and others that read down to 0.01 mm. You want the one can read 0.01mm. I know, it probably isn't perfectly accurate or precise, but it is better than guessing. That 0.1 mm caliper probably isn't very accurate or precise in that last digit either. I use the cheapo "Pittsburg" caliper from Harbor Freight that are usually on sale of $10. They seem to hold their zero setting (unless the battery is dying- you can tell when the display contrast drops) and seem to be repeatable in that last digit. You need to be able to read 0.01 mm when measuring filament diameter.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

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aliaj00
Wow $148.40+ for the caliper, i see why you keep it in the house. for that price you get the electronics of the prusa i3.
Well i am way cheaper then you i keep mine in the box it came with, and very lightly oiled just in case. i got mine around 25 Euros it was stock in a shop and he wanted to get rid of it i guess.

My cheap one was about £18 ($25?) but I think they're a lot cheaper nowadays. The cheapo ones are OK and do the job - but the Mitutoyo is better! What really used to annoy me was when I'd set a target size on the cheap one so that I could machine down to that size - and, just as I'm about to take the last measurement, it would turn off automatically thus ruining all my careful planning.

The cheap digital calipers that you can buy on eBay from China for less than AU$20 (about 10 to 15 pounds sterling / euros) are perfect.

As others have said, make sure you get ones which read to 0.01 mm, not the 0.1 mm variety, and get steel jaws, not plastic. (The plastic / composite jaws might be useful if you need to measure live circuit boards etc, but I much prefer the machined stainless steel jaws.)

Mine are remarkably well made, very reliable, and utterly repeatable - they go back to "0.00" every time I close them. They can be zeroed at any point (but I almost never use the for anything other than 0.00 = fully closed), can measure both inside and outside dimensions, and also have a "down-the-hole" function for measuring the depth of blind holes etc.

Best $15 I ever spent!

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Follow my Mendel Prusa build here: [julianh72.blogspot.com]

I re-read what I'd written in my last post, and my emphasis was a bit off - I should have emphasised that a cheap digital caliper is EXACTLY what you require, as long as it reads to 0.01mm/0.0005". I'm sure that you will find lots of other uses for it - mine get used almost every day, mostly for measuring domestic stuff (e.g. screw diameters).

Yeah in use every day battery still going strong. Which is more than can be said for my Ph tester

First, just a quick note that the term "Digital Vernier Calipers" is quite correct. Although the display is digital, the manner in which the position is obtained from internal capacitative sensors is a vernier method.
I have had unfortunate experiances with budget range tools failing - only a feeling of disquiet stopped the last Digital Vernier Caliper giving me an incorrect reading and resulting in several hundreds of pounds of damage. I have decided to only get top quality even if it means spending time finding good tools at a price I can afford. I have seen genuine Mitutoyo 150mm Digimatic calipers at £60 (and some "might be genuine" at £40 or less)

Until I find a digital one I can trust I will rely on my Mitutoyo non-digital vernier calipers - at least I never have to worry about batteries.

Mike

Dont forget the solar ones too, I'm sure if I had a mill I'd need more quality tools, but a healthy mix of digital and analogue dials, I found a micrometer in a shop the other day, but thought do I really need it when i have the calipers, but couldnt think of a good enough reason for having them except nostalgia, and the love of craftsmanship.

A good enough reason for using old measuring equipment is that they stay good. Photo below is a Moore and Wright micrometer from the 1970s. It reads to 2 microns (1 micron between divisions) and is completely accurate and trustworthy.

The last 3 digital vernier calipers that I bought since 2010 have all died.

Mike

I have a micrometer like that, measuring 0 - 1"... which isn't much use to me as I mostly work in metric. Also, filament is measured in metric, and values entered into slicers are the same. I often measure larger sizes, so again it's not much use - I use the digital calipers up to 150mm/6", and another mechanical dial vernier caliper up to 300mm/12". Therfore, while it is an accurate device, it sits unused at the back of my bench.