digital angle finders??

[RICH MUISE]

Anybody here using digital angle finder stuff to set up there cars? I know the Hamb guys are big on them..I did a search this morning and am finding everything from the low $20 range to over a grand. Most of the seem to be in the 150-200 range for the average pro. ones. The $28 hf one is accurate to .3 degrees...close enough? The ones I've found that are accurate to .1 degree or closer are pretty much 75ish or more. I've got a "good" bubble type by Bostich, but I'm not getting real good repetative readings with it.

[Ecode70D]

Rich
    I'm kinda low tech.   The bubble ones have worked fine for me over the years.

[RICH MUISE]

I may play with mine a bit more before I give up on it.
I'm a low tech guy also, but there are a few things I sure don't want to be without anymore..cell phone on the road,definetly my GPS, and just recently my bluetooth car adapter. Bluetooth is great if your deaf like me and can't hear worth a damn on a cell phone, esp. in a moving car. Also my city just banned hand held cell phones usage within city limits...yeah!!! Anyway, got to liking it when my wife got her Toyota last year, and I just bought an el cheapo at walmarts..30 bucks..doesn't go thru the radio speakers though. Just clips on to the sunvisor and has it's own mic and speaker...works great.

[Ecode70D]

Rich
    I use them for setting the angle of the engine to the angle of the rear ends.  I'm happy when I get it to within 1/2 to 1 degree.
Jay

[Ford Blue blood]

Well I guess I'm in the dark ages....don't have none of that stuff....this machine is about as HI-TECH as it gets for me.  My cell is a track phone, run out of time before I use all my minutes....don't have Nav, no need for it....I know where North is and can usually find my way home with a maqp.

Now having said that, my angle finder is an old Sears bubble unit, my calipers are of an unknown brand, the print has worn off years ago....and I still have my slide rule from my eletronics engineering school....so....analog stuff gets the jod done pretty well if you use it often and hone your skills.  Keep "playing" with that ol bubble job, you'll get good with it.

[Tom S]

Bubble angle finder?   
Got one something like this.

[Ecode70D]

Yep
    I have a couple of Them like that also.
jay

[RICH MUISE]

I looked at several of those today...one at Lowe's that seemed like the needle was hanging up, but the one at harbor freight was silky smooth..may pick one of those up. The buble type we were talking about is like a regular level with one vial that is mounted in a rotating , graduated holder. The one I have was so hard to turn (it's almost new),it made it a pain to use. I sprayed some wd40 on it and got it moving a little smoother today. Tommorrow i'll work some pbblaster lithium liquid grease on it. and see if i can make it right.

[Tom S]

I don't know how those bubble ones work but seems like it would be hard to be very accurate if you have to try to center a bubble.  One like I showed with a big dial works pretty good.  The bigger the dial the better.
The lens busted out on mine & I sharpened the pointer. 
If you want something to be super accurate it also helps if you know your trigonometry.  Used trig at work all the time.

[RICH MUISE]

Trig....need to brush up on it..forgotten most of what I knew. Worked in machine shops for 20 years. Amongst a lot of other things, I was the shop mathematician. If we were putting a job out into the shop that required calculations, when I planned out the jobs, I'd also do all the required math and include the sketches in the job packet. I also programmed NC machines back in the early days of Numerical controled machines. All the programing was written out by hand, there were no computers in offices. Hard to imagine, heh? The machine controllers had very few canned cycles..almost everything was point to point (straight line moves). Some programming jobs required days and sometimes weeks of just calculating the path of end mills. Nowadys the computers calculate everything..which is why you see so much billet stuff. Can you imagine trying to hand machine some of these one off wheels they pop out nowadays.
Funny..when you're programming like I use to, you'd have to focus on one calculation, and one line of info at a time. Once you got that one line entered, you learned to clear your brain of that info so you could work on the next line of info. You kept doing that over and over. Trouble is, I got to the point where I couldn't remember numbers when I needed to..phone numbers, zip codes, ect.

[LAUDY57]

Rich, you must have used one of those old machinist's bubble levels - good ones like the Starret would get you within tenths of minutes.

[RICH MUISE]

No...never used one, in fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen one. To set angles in the shop we'd use sine bars/plates and Jo blocks and sweep it with an indicator.

[Ford Blue blood]

OH boy...getting out of my house...the fab shop I worked at for a year after the Navy had Laser references, all vertical and horizontal "marks" were taken off of that.....thye broadcast the "marks" through the shop, just had to "drop down" or "angle over" to be square.  Loved it, no worry being on the mark.

[LAUDY57]

Yeah, we used sine bars and jo blocks on the machine tool beds or layout tables but elsewhere we'd use bubble levels. Not very often, because they were too precise. The best Starrett one was about 14 in long and each gradation on the bubble tube was 1/2 thou. It came, and was stored in, a beautiful wooden box with dovetailed corners, felt lining and if someone was looking for an ordinary level and picked this up it was "git yer friggin' hands off that!".
We never had all this neat laser stuff that's available even for home use now, at that time lasers were Buck Rogers weapons!

[RICH MUISE]

Laudy..sending you a pm