Well, I have to say I didn't expect much for the price, but I did expect they'd be better than this. I was initially encouraged when these spring calipers arrived. They were packaged in (thankfully) sealed plastic bags, slathered in the usual old rancid machine oil to keep the cheap steel from rusting in transit. But these were even messier than they looked. Once I used a half a roll of paper towels to clean all the oil off, the initial surface finish, though far short of a precision tool, wasn't half bad. They cleaned up fairly well, at least until until you look closely. You can see in the pictures the quality of the machining of the actual working parts, the screw and nut, etc. They look like they were hacked out in the dark by a guy who only had a triangular file. Lousy threads, sharp edges and filing/grinding marks everywhere The comments in this review pretty much apply to all 3 of the tools in this set. I just took photos of the first one as I cleaned it up. All of them were of similar (lousy) quality. In each case, the nut would hang up at several points along the screw threads. These screws looked like they had been beaten after threading with a terrible die. I had to take them apart and run a die down the threads to even get the nut to run semi-cleanly along the threads. (2 of them literally came apart on their own when I screwed the nut out to clean the crap out of the threads.) Now they operate OK, but the factory threading was absolutely terrible. The screw portion is just screwed into the swivel fitting and unscrewed each time I turned the knob before I cleaned the threading up myself. It isn't pinned, or even loc-tited in place. Just jammed in there, a little bit. In the second pic, and the last, you can see how even with the nut screwed out a long way, the fitting where the screw goes through is so roughly machined, it won't even slide on the screw to let the caliper open up. It hangs up on the rough threads, and doesn't move. If you smack it, or wiggle things around enough, it will finally spring suddenly out to full extension. The ferrule under the adjustment screw hits the arm of the caliper, rather than the fitting it's supposed to ride against. Just lousy dimensioning on the part, and bad machining. It will work, but it will rub badly on the sharp edge. A smooth operating precision tool, it ain't. Again, you can't expect much for the price, I guess, but I think we have a right to expect them to at least operate. I spent over an hour just getting them to work at all, because I didn't have time to send them back and try something else. Fortunately, the job I bought these for makes the lousy quality somewhat irrelevant. I just needed a cheap set, and that's what I got. But I think I'll invest in something a little less heinous next time.
