emporary Digital Readout for Milling Machine
Philip -
For some time I've thought about making a magnetic setup so I could use a regular caliper as a temporary digital readout on a couple of machines. At first I thought about the lathe tailstock ram, but never seemed to have felt the need strongly enough.
At Gryphon we use a Grizzly "wood mill" for any number of processes, and maybe once a month or so I've wished I had DRO on the x-axis to facilitate drilling equally spaced holes in guitar bridges. Last week I acted on that impulse and made up some magnetic caliper holders. It's a natural for the remote readout!
Once I had it figured out, the setup time was down to about a minute.
Hmmm, as I look at the bottom pic, I realize I could have mounted the caliper upside down and backward to get a better grip on the jaws - no need to be able to read the display, of course.
My little Rusnok mill is where I'm sure I'll be using this rig. With its 4" x 7" table travel, it's too small for a dedicated DRO:
Doing a job where I need to copy a slighlty complex item, so I did a fair amount of measuring on the lathe. First thing I noticed was how important it was to have the readout where it was convenient for easy viewing:
Here, I had it on the wall behind the lathe, but it was too much out of my field of vision, so I took some time to make a holder that would keep it in view right above the headstock. In this shot, I'm holding the caliper by the jaws to get a more accurate reading:
(I'd been planning to make the bracket for other use, such as mounting dial test indicator arms, so now seemed like the right time.)
Don't know what I did to get this reading:
I made five identical parts, so I used the Easy Read a couple dozen times. So far I counted half a dozen times when I craned my neck around trying to read the caliper directly, only to remember I could simply look over at the remote.
The caliper is a bit clunky to handle, of course, and it won't lay flat against anything anymore because of the box on the back side.