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My < $5 calipers from Amazon, which for a while were "good enough" are now ready to be retired for a more accurate / consistent one.

What recommendations do you have? I'm not looking to break the bank, these will get used 4-5 times a year most likely but, I need to get the same measurement of the same object each time I use them.

high-end dial

I bought a highly rated digital caliper from Amazon last weekend, the second day I was using it, it refused to work, the third day it was fine. I will stick to dial calipers from now on

Starrett, Mitutoyo, Tesa/Brown and Sharpe , and SPI all sell good digital calipers. Good ones are not cheap.

But I don’t use them. I have probably half a dozen vintage dial calipers that cost less used by far than good digital calipers. Same brands, but there are some others come days of yore including Etalon. My Etalon dial caliper is better than the Mitutoyos I have, and the old SAE Mitu is better the the newer metric Mitu, but they all work and I didn’t pay more that fifty bucks for any of them. These are premium brands. Etalon’s old design is now made by Tesa, but with more plastic.

Rick “anything with a battery is dead when I need it” Denney

I work in a machine shop (swiss lathe) and make parts for nascar/NHRA teams, surgical equipment, injection molding, tool and die etc. We use mahr for digital calipers, but that's only for rough checks. For accurate measurements we use micrometers. Mitsutoyo are very good. SPI is a swiss made copy lower price, my boss says they source parts from mitsutoyo.

If your tolerances are .01- .001. Mahr will be ok. If they are .001-.0001, then you want the appropriate micrometers.

I bought mitsutoyo micrometers because they were recommended by the guy from the county weights and measures dept. That inspects and certifies our tools.

Hope this is helpful.

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I have an old set of tenth-reading micrometers that are rebadged Mitutoyos. The brand (Fowler) is now Chinese crap, but they were a good value 30 years ago. I test them from time to time using my Starrett-Webber gauge blocks, so I know they are accurate.

My mics larger than 4” are old Lufkins, thousandth-reading. But I also have an old Etalon 12” micro-adjusting vernier caliper that reads thousandths accurately.

Mitutoyo is the brand most likely to be sold as counterfeit—meaning a lookalike with a counterfeit brand marking. I have a fake set of Mitutoyo calipers, and they are accurate enough but are really rough compared to the real thing. Can’t be used one-handed. I did get a refund but was told to keep them. I would not buy new Mitutoyo calipers on eBay or from Amazon these days—stick with reputable machinery suppliers like MSC.

Rick “good stuff costs more for a reason” Denney

Tractor Supply HAD been (??) selling this huge cards of the large and small wafer batteries for only a few bucks.

ANY large will work in ANY large application, and ANY small will work in ANY small application...but some will last longer than others, depending on (avoiding electrical jargon) how much muscle they have...

...ie. all the large are the same voltage as each other, and all the small are the same voltage as each other.

The WEAKEST small ones should easily fire up ANY digital calipers...so that's a ton of those batteries for pennies - compared to the "Walgreens" types of prices.

Even with the CHEAPO calipers that are on my bench (Harbor Freight and - after they fall on the floor a few dozen times, they go in the trash and are replaced) I'm sick-and-tired of digital, and only buy dial. If I need a metric conversion, I know that a tiny bit over 39⅓/1000ths of an inch is a millimeter, and - if I need more accuracy, I can reach over to the window and grab the 20-year-old calculator the runs off solar thingies.

bloke "I never could type numbers into a calculator as fast as my Dad could run his slide rule."