No matter whether you have one big car or two Minis, if you’re going to do on it yourself, chances are you’re going to have to have something to measure parts and so on with. Well the old tried and true is a micrometer such as we see here just make sure you use your standard to keep it perfectly calibrated.

But in today’s world, well it’s digital let’s face it. And here we have the most common tool that you’re gonna find around the repair shop. And that is a digital micrometer caliper whatever you wanna call it. And this can measure inside, outside, and depth. See here we can measure the inside of something here we measure the outside over here we measure the depth. In other words if we wanted to see the inside diameter of this lifter bore here we would simply put it in here, take the reading and there we have it.

Alright now brake rotors big problems on cars. How do we measure them? We use one of these dial indicators, it has a flexible arm that we clamp to the chassis of the vehicle then we align this to the rotor and spin the rotor and watch what happens. A lot of them are two thousandths of an inch or less that is allowed to keep the brake from pulsating.

Alright now other things you may wanna know the inside diameter of a pipe or something like that, here we can check the inside diameter of this cylinder by putting this tool down in here. Now what we’re actually doing is when we put the tool in here we put it in compressed then we turn this, these come out against the sides then we lock it down again and then use one of these other tools to measure the distance from end to end. Not good enough for machine shop work but good enough to get to in the ballpark.

Another thing that we see lots of times is you have to torque various bolts, intake manifolds, heads, things like that. So you wanna make sure that there’s nothing down in the hole that is going to prevent the bolt from tightening properly or torqueing properly. So, this depth indicator because it’s really gentle, we can put this down in there, and we can measure the depth and compare it through all of the holes to make sure there’s no debris, old gasket or something like that down in there because that will ruin your day.

And if you have question or a comment, drop me a line right here at MotorWeek.