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14 January 2014

Using the digital caliper

I have now used the General® UltraTech™ Fraction+ model #1433 3-inch digital caliper (UPC 0-38728-01433-7) a few times and am not impressed.

The first thing I did was use it as a converter.&npbs; I needed to know how many millimeters in an inch.  Because the tool does not have a fine-adjustment wheel, I kept missing the 1-inch mark.  It took several minutes to finally coax the decide to exactly 1 inch.  Those are minutes I will not get back.

Later, I needed to determine how wide something was.  I opened the calipers and used the outside jaws to place them.  However, I forgot to turn the unit on, so I pressed the on button and remeasured.  The number that appeared was much smaller than what the piece looked like.  Fiddling with the caliper, I noticed that there was sometimes a negative distance.  I turned the unit off and on again to confirm my suspicion.  Sure enough, the unit starts at zero no matter how far the caliper is spread.&nbps; To get a true measurement, one has to close the caliper and zero it out, just like taring a scale to zero.  Hence, every time I use the caliper, I have to press it closed and hit zero before measuring.  This is a little bit of an inconvenience and, therefore, an annoyance.

I will post again when I have used the item more.

As always, I welcome your comments.  Click on the Comment link below; it may say "No" or have a number in front of it.

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