Wayne, you will find use for both a caliper and a micrometer, I have sorta-cheap nylon calipers for casual use and much more expensive electronic digital calipers for serious use. Fitted wooden tray-boxes protect each of them from accidents on the bench. Nothing can protect them from a trip to the floor tho.
Dont forget spare batterys for the electronic slide caliper. A micrometer has serious range limitations, and can be a challenge to read, but it also gets into some places that a slide caliper cant. With special anvils you can accurately measure thread root diameters, useful if one is making custom screws. Many slide calipers have inconveniantly shaped body parts, making some measurements imposible. Stew-mac offers a modified slide caliper that measures the height of an installed fret - using the depth guage rod in reverse. I would buy the general nylon slide caliper and the longest digital slide caliper you can afford. Add a General 0-1" micrometer when the budget allows. Starret makes nice but very expensive stuff. -- Dana Emery To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
