Go Dial or Go Digital ?

[Article99]

Work on manual machinery grinding carbide all day. Dry and wet grinding.
Have used Mitutoyo and Starrett. The japanese digital caliper works well when new, but soon dies in the arse from the dust and dirt. The Starrett survives reasonably well in comparison.

However I don't trust either of them. You simply have no idea where they are and rather than trying to get a feel for the size, you look at the display and wiggle it until you see a number you're happy with.

Either a dial or scale Starrett for me. (And that's coming from Aus, where they're nearly twice the price of the bloody Japanese gear.)

Where the accuracy needs to be any better than 0.1mm, I ditch the caliper and go straight to a scale micrometer. Much easier to get a good feel of size and know it's the truth.

[dertsap]

if you happen to buy mitutoyo avoid anythig thats made in brazil ,
absolute garbage
i was so disappointed with their digitals that i vowed never to buy anything mitutoyo again due to the quality and support ,
been 5 yrs since then i saw a good sale price on their newer swiss style 8" dial calipers (brazil) figured i'd give them another chance which was an outright stupid judgement call , garbage again , i am constantly calibrating and adjusting them
NEVER AGAIN ! their quality isn t what it used to be

try tesa , they make nice stuff , lil more price but definite quality

[SE Plastics]

We switched to digitals on the shop floor about 8 years ago. Hands down, we get longer life from the digitals than we ever got on dial calipers. We run in a production environment, our calipers are not babied. We seem to get 4-5 years from the digitals at which point they are still working, but have been dropped enough so that the contact points are no longer accurate.