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farmermatt -- What's you budget like? If you wallet is fat, you don't mind it getting a lot skinnier, and you don't want to have anyone kid you about your tools, ever . . . buy Swiss-made instruments, either Tesa or Etalon micrometers and Tesa or Interrapid dial indicators. As the newspaper restaurant reviews would put it, $$$$. Starrett micrometers and Brown & Sharpe Best-Test indicators will save you a lot of cash for only a small step down in quality (or prestige). A worthy alternative to the Starrett micrometer is the US-made Scherr-Tumico; the S-T prices are usually a bit below Starrett's. Mitutoyo is another small step down in both price and prestige, but still "professional machinist" quality. The Mitutoyo dial indicators are about as economical as I can comfortably suggest, but there are other micrometers worth considering. Several of the mail-order mill supply houses (MSC, Travers Tool, J & L Industrial, and so forth) sell a line of Polish micrometers that are VERY nice for the price. As I recall, the brand name on the Polish micrometers is VIS. There's also a high-quality line of Chinese micrometers that should meet your needs. I recently bought a 0 - 25 millimeter micrometer from Enco for US$ 18 or thereabouts that turned out to be a lot higher quality than I expected. It looks much like a Mitutoyo, not like the generic Chinese micrometers, and I wouldn't be surprised if the big-wigs in Tokyo are staying awake at night worrying about what this line of much-better-than-generic Chinese micrometers will do to their sales. Finally, at the bottom of the price barrel are the generic Chinese micrometers. From what I've seen, very few of them come out of the box in usable condition, being grease-packed and poorly adjusted. But if your wallet is undernourished and you know how to clean and adjust micrometers you'll find the generic Chinese micrometers usually have "good bones" and, while they'll never be pretty, can be coaxed to reliability. Between work and home, I use Etalon, Starrett, Brown & Sharpe (both US-made and Swiss-made versions), Lufkin, Scherr-Tumico, Mitutoyo, NSK, Moore & Wright, Polish, the higher-quality Chinese, and generic Chinese micrometers. Sure, I like some of them better than others, but even the generic Chinese -- once properly cleaned and adjusted -- can be relied on to measure within a fraction of a thousandth of an inch, day in and day out. Ok, next subject. You'll need to hold your dial indicator somehow. If you decide to do that job with a magnetic base, I'll recommend the Israeli-made Noga "single-knob" (sometimes called "hydraulic") mag base that sells for about US$ 80 from any of the mail-order suppliers. The Noga bases work wonderfully well. John
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