Dial Caliper: Fractional or Decimal

Soon it will be....

Joe Rogers, Northern Virginia

>time to tether your work bench to you so you won't wander off looking for something to throw at the cat.JR :-)

Re: Isn't it time....

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>Does a regular tape measure work for you? I'm right-handed and a regular one is always upside down. I nearly always measure right to left so I can scribe a mark with my right hand while holding the tape with my right. But then, that's just me.

Bruce, for whom a regular calipers works fine.

Re: tape measure ergonomics?

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>I'm left handed, as I guess you noticed, and a regular tape measure works just fine, most of the time. I hadn't analyzed why, but will offer some off the cuff thoughts as I think about it now. I wear it on my belt, on my right hip, and reach for it with my right hand, leaving my left hand to mark with a pencil or knife. That works fine if I'm going to crosscut with the RAS or TS, but it's inconvenient for crosscutting with a hand saw, if I want the offcut to hang off the left end of the bench, not because the numbers are upside down, but because I have to turn the board end-for-end after marking it. That seems to be easier than swapping pencil and tape and marking with my right hand. Maybe there's a better way to do this?

If I have to hook the other end of the board, reading the numbers upside down is not a problem, as I can read upside down almost as fast as right side up.

I think someone make tapes that are printed the other side up, but I don't know if they reverse the clip, too. Maybe the answer is to get one of each, and wear one on each hip, like Yosemite Sam? I like the 12' ones with the 3/4" wide tape, because they fit my hand the best. I'm always dropping either larger or smaller tapes.

Attention Rob Lee

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>I'm picturing the "Multi-dial caliper, reads in imperial decimals, imperial fractions, metric, Whitworth, and classic Japanese units of measure" for next April. Something kind of Victorian-looking, like those watches with eighteen dials including the moon's phases (I guess so you know when to plant root vegetables between exotic adventures).

Re: Isn't it time....(minor hijack)

Jack Guzman from Maine

>" I've tried it with reading glasses and tape measures. These things migrate in flocks. It only takes about a week for all of them to disappear. Then, I have to search all over the shop, the house, the car, the firewood pile, the bottom of the frog pond, etc., until I find them all hiding in one pile somewhere, laughing at me. It's always some obscure place different from where they congregated the last time. I have found I need one tethered pair of glasses, and one tethered tape measure."

I'm that way with pencils.I have hundreds of them,in the truck,in the shop,on my desk --but I always seem to lose them.I recently found a neat new gadget at HD.It's a tiny belt clip with a spring loaded cord that has a rubber pencil gripper on the end of it.Since I got that thing I always have one pencil handy at all times.---Jack

Re: Isn't it time....(minor hijack)

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>Hey, if it works with electronic entertainment device remotes*, why not with digital pencils?

* You find a remote, punch the Help button, and somewhere, hidden behind the gingerbread in your victorian (or neo-gothic) wall-to-wall entertainment center, your multi-acre screen HDTV beeps, letting you know where you misplaced it. Of course, if all your reading glasses are hiding somewhere in the bowels of your Castro Convertible couch, snickering at you, you might have accidentally picked up another of your flock of communications devises, pushed some other button, and inadvertently ordered three 18" Sicilian pepperoni, garlic and black olive pizzas.

Re: Attention Rob Lee

Rob Lee

>Hi Bill -

A great idea.... but we actually make those tools you know...!

There're a few suitable candidates....;)

Cheers -

Rob

I agree

Derek

>I taught my kids to count to 1023 with their 10 fingers - though some numbers are politically incorrect :>).

Seriously though, I use a vernier caliper for most of the work I do in the shop because it is easier and quicker to get readings for wood thickness. It is cheap and if I drop it I am out very little. I do not need 1000's in thickness but do want to be very close to 3/4" or 1/2" or 11/16" and it is soooo easy to measure these extremely accurately with this tool.

I use a decimal dial caliper occasionally when I need more accuracy. I probably use it for checking plane shavings more often than anything else and decimal works better for this. I also use it for checking drill bits (like - I have had a brain freeze, which size was this?) when the vernier is not going to be easy/quick enough.