How To Use A Micrometer

Taking a micrometer measurement reading doesn’t have to be hard. Dr. Nichola Swann will show you how to take a measurement reading from a standard micrometer or vernier micrometer in this short video. Make sure to watch until the end for extra tips!

A micrometer, sometimes known as a micrometer screw gauge, is a device incorporating a calibrated screw widely used for accurate measurement of components in mechanical engineering and machining as well as most mechanical trades, along with other metrological instruments such as dial, vernier, and digital calipers.

Video transcript below:

00:00:09:03 – 00:00:11:02
Hi. I’m Nichola from LaBLiFe.

00:00:11:02 – 00:00:15:16
In this video, I’m going to show you
how to take a reading with a micrometer.

00:00:16:09 – 00:00:18:13
Okay, so if we go to the close up here,

00:00:19:05 – 00:00:23:22
you can see that on this micrometer,
we are essentially working with a scale

00:00:24:12 – 00:00:28:17
on this chamber
here, and a scale on the main shaft here.

00:00:29:12 – 00:00:32:20
So if I just rotate this out of the way,

00:00:33:15 – 00:00:36:22
you can see that on the scale
here, we’ve got millimeters.

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So on the top it’s like one millimeter
two millimeter, three millimeter and so on.

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And then on the bottom, you see we’ve got
another millimeter scale down here.

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So on the bottom here, this is denoting

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every half millimeter on the micrometer.

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So if we were to go in order,
we’d come to the bottom scale first

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and you get 0.5 mil. Top scale from one
mil down back to the bottom for 1.5.

00:01:00:04 – 00:01:03:00
Back up to the top for two mil
and so on and so forth.

00:01:03:12 – 00:01:08:02
And then on top of that,
you can see on this rotating chamber

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that we have got up to
50 increments on this thing.

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So to work out

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the increment there

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if we wheel it straight back to zero.

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And you’ll see here that I’m using
the fine toggle here, not the coarse one.

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If we hit back to zero,
if I rotate this through

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the full 50 on the chamber, you will see

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takes me straight to that 0.5 mil

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mark on the bottom scale.

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So we know that 50 of the increments
on this rotating

00:01:43:03 – 00:01:47:21
chamber equals 0.5 mil here.

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So if we do the math, we can work out
that each increment on this

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rotating chamber is 0.01 millimeters.

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So in other words, if you’ve got 50 times
0.01, that gets us to 0.5.

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And we know that equates to the 0.5
mil mark on here.

00:02:03:14 – 00:02:05:00
With me so far? Hope so.

00:02:06:14 – 00:02:10:18
Right, so let’s take a measurement of something.

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I am going to measure this little spanner
that comes with the micrometer.

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So I’ve opened it enough
just to get this thing inside

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I’ll just have to go off camera to tighten

00:02:24:10 – 00:02:27:21
this up. We’re trying to do it like this.

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And then again,
I’m going to rotate this fine

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knob here

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just so it doesn’t over rotate.

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If you do it with the course, want,
it just doesn’t stop automatically.

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This is got like an auto stop on
so it won’t over rotate, right…

00:02:41:21 – 00:02:45:24
So let’s have a look at what measurement
it wants to give.

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So on the top scale here,

00:02:52:23 – 00:02:55:08
trying to get this in focus
for you on the top so you can see that

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we’ve gone past
the one mil mark on the bottom.

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We’ve gone past 1.5.

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And then on top of that,
we have got, it basically depends where that

00:03:08:20 – 00:03:09:10
mark on the

00:03:09:10 – 00:03:13:17
main shaft of the micrometer
lines up with the one on the tiny scale.

00:03:13:23 – 00:03:16:23
So you can see that’s five
of these smaller increments.

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So essentially what we’ve got is
we want to add

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five times 0.01.

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That’s the value
that we’ve got from the rotating chamber

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on to 1.5 mil from the main one.

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So it’s 1.5 plus

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0.05, which is going to give us
1.55 millimeters.

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And that is going to be the width of

00:03:40:01 – 00:03:42:03
this spanner.

00:03:42:19 – 00:03:44:19
Right. That’s it in a nutshell.

00:03:44:19 – 00:03:48:18
Thanks for joining
and I hope to see you next time.

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