Quijote
Full Access Member
I beg to differ Quijote as the older Swiss made Brown & Sharpe have been the "gold standard" for over 60 years. Not owning or supporting modern day Brown & Sharpe calipers being farmed out to other countries still maintaining "Swiss Made" on their dials. We were issued Mitutoyo's back in the day (1972) working production in the machine shop manufacturing cardiograph machines, vacuum abortion machines, BBE glaucoma air puff probes. The companies monthly dial caliper replacements went down to 28% vs 63% replacements before when they issued us Helios calipers. Forget about them issuing Brown & Sharp calipers unless you brought your own. Sill have both B&S in Imperial and metric. Talking 47 trouble free years used almost daily with my personal machining projects says something about B&S's durability.
Several B&S calipers, Starrett and Helios vs the Vernier calipers I also use are all treated like my left and right nuts......~~=o&o>.....
B&S could well be the best. I'm not going to argue that. But I've worked for 20 years at and with many engineering companies and visited countless suppliers and customers and Mitutoyos are everywhere (R&D, Metrology labs, QA labs, etc.) and not a single complaint and I hardly saw B&S. Ours have not been handled kindly and have never been out of calibration on the yearly re-certifications. I also have nothing but good things to say about Starrett (own many Starrett products) and have a set of inch dial calipers and have toured their factory (talk about historic and being frozen in time! - which also explains their cost).
So perhaps B&S have a historic reputation and are excellent, but for whatever reason Mitutoyo seems to have taken over from what I have seen. Just checked and prices are also comparable to Mitutoyo, so it is not a cost issue. I just spent $500 on 3 digital calipers for engineers in my group and didn't even look up B&S. I have worked for 12 years in engineering R&D at company that designed and manufactured world-class testing and instrumentation equipment. When we incorporated third-party measurement gauges we only spec'd Heidenhain or Mitutoyo, and for lasers we used Keyence.
It seems I am not alone. https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/2uzcug/brown_and_sharpe_vs_starrett/