Ok here is what I do when I want a name brand mic. for cheap. Go to a big city pawn shop. Pick out the very worst part of town. The location where any one with sense wouldn't go. Sense no respectable machinist would shop there and the crackheads don't use mics. They can often be had for $10.00 each. I did pay a premium for a 11 to 12 inch Lufkin it was $15. Don't expect to get the standards. They must use them for stiring dope.
This is a pretty good idea. I laughed when I read it. And I imagine the crackheads are the ones bringing the mics in to sell. They just didn't have the sense to steal the standards along with the mics.
NOw my two cents about Enco mics- Enco brand everything is always import, and for them it seems like import is almost always china. Application is almost always the bottom line, what is it being used for, how good does it need to be? In my own experience, admittedly rather little it may be, machining tools suffer from the law of diminishing return moreso than almost any other product I can name. That is to say you can spend 5 dollars on a horrible product, 8 dollars on a good product, 15 on a really good product, and 30 on a product that it slightly better than the 15 dollar product. for example, my first set of personal OD mics was a set of Fowler 0-6. And I didn't really need them, I had ready access to a set of shop Mitutoyos, I just wanted my own. For when I did need my own set, like when I got a better job. And they served me very well for many many years and made me lots and NOT lots of money at times haha. Were they as good as the shops Mitutoyos? No. Were they as hefty and as silky smooth as the starretts I have now? Hell no. Was I able to hold half thou tolerances on them and get accurate, repeatable measurements without any head scratchin? Yep. For years. And that whole 0-6 set cost me leass than any TWO of the Starretts.
In another example, two of my co workers both have import mics. The first has had a 0-12 set for probably about ten years, have probably been handled, ahem, roughly by this particular guy.These mics are pretty solid, they appear to be a stamped frame, have a typical ribbing along the body with a lip around the outside edge where the dies met up, but the metal is smooth and the paint is a baked enamel. The anvils are peculiarly small and the thimbles seem very large but they are ratchet stopped, carbide faced and locknutted.The threads feel clumsy and rather, well, horrible, but Ill be damned if I don;t get REASONABLY close reading with them, like, within .0002-.0003. The second guy is a pretty sharp guy, came from a couple of shops in Mexico where the company supplied EVERYTHING and now he has to buy his own stuff, and since he had to basically start from scratch these were the best he could afford. Looking through the tool catalogues he found one set tHAt Was 0-12 for like 200 and another set that was 0-12 with a pair of 12 inch calipers for the same price. So he ordered those. When they arrived the box was cracked, and when we opened the lid the standards were strewn all over the place. Later that day he called me over to his machine and he was laughing. He was checking th OD of the part he was running and he wanted me to double check his reading. So I measured it and got the same reading but it just felt WRONG. He said "look" and as he checked it I watched and was amazed as only the outmost edge of the anvile touched the part! And when I say the edge, I mean the EDGE. As in, there was light showing between the frame side of the anvil and the part. Then he showed me the other ones. On some the frames were visibly bent, the anvils drilled in line with the spindle but obivously biased towards one side of the frame. Others had rather large blowholes from the casting process. It is clear there was MINIMAL if any de burring done before they were painted with whatever lead based paint they use on the McDonalds toys. The thing that made my co worker laugh the hardest was that it looked like one of the standards had an end that got overlooked during chamfering and it looks like someone chamfered it by hand on a pedestal grinder. I am NOT making this stuff up. And I have to applaud my cowrokers good sense of humor because if I had spent my money and THIS is what came my way I am not sure I would be laughing. I sure laughed along with him though!
But even the crappy cheap ones DO measure to a standard, and with caution, good parts CAN be made with them. Sometimes we tend to forget, I think, that part of measurement is technique, and the best and most expensive tool is useless in the hands of a jack@$$. Just like good parts can be made with junk. For some applications, I think chinese stuff is as close to high dollar stuff in terms of quality that I am willing to pay for. Personally, my OD mics are not a part of my tool box I want to save money on, but to each his own.
Again, it really just comes down to application. Be careful, shop around. I think Leigh made a good point about the absence of chinese QC, whihc is something I have often thought myself, and especially about the conditions of warranties and who provides them, which is something I have failed to consider. For my dollar though, you never know what you'll need again someday; sometimes its worth the investment to get something you will WANT to use again later.
to see a person with less then 25 posts say something so uuuggghhh? Obtuse? 
