Japanese finds

[Bakafish]

Sometimes a good deal is just a slippery slope in disguise. I bought a Tesa probe for the cost of postage, (they were cleaning out grandpa's things and just wanted someone to use it) a very accurate analogue unit that is worth quite a bit, but of course it requires the associated electronics to actually use it. I looked for a while for one of the cheaper single channel meters, these are often sold under the Brown and Sharpe brand, but this foreign stuff is uncommon over here. So when a handsome 2 channel unit came up, even at a relatively good price, it was still more than I wanted to pay, but one thing leads to another. Some kind of imaginary sunk cost thing, but more sunk perceived value...



The display electronics are housed in a wonderfully orange hammertone painted casting, and has very European styling. Kind of a wonderful unit, (Adam from @laneymachinetech on Instagram has one of these) and the dual inputs can be summed or used differentially for more advanced measurements... if you have two probes. So I got another probe... see what I mean? A $3 find leads to hundreds of dollars of related expenditures



Of course at the same time, this Sony (Magnescale) 50mm probe came up with a Nikon OEM'ed ceramic plate stand for really cheap. The pictures made it look much smaller than it ended up being, that plate is over 100mm square, but it is flawless.



Compared to the Sony's 50mm of travel, the Tesa can only measure about 2mm total of probe movement, but can resolve much smaller displacements than the Sony, fractions of a micron at the highest settings.

 

[mattthemuppet]

oooh! That is some fancy stuff!

I got a Fujita machinists level in an auction lot last year, good to know a little more about the company.

 

[Bakafish]

Chatting with some fellows in the Kinetic Precision Discord, we were discussing squareness comparators. I was linking to various designs I was familiar with, the most complex being the units with a carriage that allowed readings to be taken along the entire height like the Mitutoyo Square-Master, PMC Square-Master or Indi-Square. While searching for pictures I triggered the Yahoo Auctions algorithm to show me this Mahr Rectimar unit which I picked up cheaply.



It came in the original sturdy wooden box, with all accessories, even the soft dust cover. It's in really good shape, and seems pretty rare which is why I'm posting it here (maybe someone has more information or a manual on it.) From what I could find it is supposed to be accurate to 5 microns and the adjustments seem well designed. The column lock has a clever clutch hidden in the head of the thumbscrew, it's extremely well constructed. I'll test the accuracy and align it with my autocollimator and optical square when I get a chance.