Will this work on a shure cartridge

Nope…don’t bother…hard to calibrate…not enough range to allow for most types of cartridges…better off getting a digital one…which I eventually did and it works great!

Does this gauge include instructions and ideal tracking forces?

Minimal instructions, but sufficient; the process is very simple. There is no "ideal" tracking force in general. The tracking force is determined by the manufacturer of the cartridge you are using, and it varies depending on your brand of cartridge and the model. Even "ideal" is an approximation, and manufacturers call this "optimal" tracking force. Depending on your tonearm you might want to be just a little above or below the optimal tracking force. To find out the optimal tracking force you have to go by what the manufacturer recommends. This should have come with your cartridge. But judging by the Ortofon gauge I got it will not be accurate at all. Likely it will be off by more than half a gram. I recommend you get something better. The Audio Additives brand sold by Music Direct in Chicago is the best gauge for the money, but it is expensive--about $75 dollars.

Is this as accurate as the Shure gauge?

Hard to say if one is more accurate than the other. They are both accurate within reason for the majority of phono cartridges you might use. If you have a very sensitive high end cartridge I would recommend a digital guage.

Spirit level? The review written by ChatGPT was not well edited by Rob the human. This device has no spirit level. It is a lever and fulcrum device.

This is a pretty simple but very effective stylus gauge. I have a couple of electronic gauges, the vintage precision stylus force gauge SFG-2 from Shure and Ortofon SPG. Cheap electronic gauges are troublemakers - depleted or leaked batteries, need to be calibrated every time, and finally - NOT SO PRECISE, because results highly depend on where you put the needle within the metering area. Ortofon and Shure use the same mechanical static balance design. Shure has an adjustable (using a counterweight slider) measuring range of 0~3g with 0.05g precision while Ortofon has a range of 0~4g but provides hi-precision results only when you place the stylus exactly on the printed mark (in this case precision is 0.05g too), but in between it is quite difficult to know the precise reading. Good news that Ortofon has marking for most standard pressure levels: 1.25, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 and 4 gramm. Unfortunately, Shure ceased SFG-2 production long ago and you can only source it from eBay. Since I have a number of cartridges with different pressure requirements, I used the Ortofon gauge very often until I purchased the Shure SFG-2 when I switched cartridges. I suppose that there are some super expensive, fancy uber-precise electronic gaguges around but I never owned one, because $25 static balance scale from Ortofon or Shure does the job with the same result.

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