You can buy these with a calibration certificate for like $70, but I skipped the cert. Should be the same quality, cost me $16. I chose the version with the superior units of measurement.
You can buy these with a calibration certificate for like $70, but I skipped the cert. Should be the same quality, cost me $16. I chose the version with the superior units of measurement.
I don’t know about the accuracy. Those inches look awefully small. 😁
They’re centi-inches
You joke but there are actually architects scale tape measures out there that have tenths of a foot and tenths and hundreths of an inch rather than the normal fractional scale.
Be warned if one is around, you might be about to have a really bad day.
Are those the funky triangular ones? My dad had one for some reason.
The triangular ones are sales used for drawing and measuring plans in standard scales. There are engineering scales and Architectural scales, which are very different.
The Engineering scales use scales of 1:10, 1:20, 1:30, 1:40, 1:50, and 1:60 scales, and are usually used for drawing at a scale like “1 inch= 50 feet”. They’re generally used for civil engineering, so the plans show a larger area.
Architectural scales have scales based on fractional inches and are weirder, with units that are 1.5", 1", 1/2", 3/8", 3/16", and 1/8". They’re used for larger scale drawing like buildings rather than the site-level drawing from the engineers.
I’ve seen that! I don’t think the bulk justifies the 6 sides unless you take nerd cred into account.
Seriously, they are very useful if you are doing something relevant like drawing a scale plan for a house addition you want to build and have to submit a set of blueprints to the building inspector. Done that a few times. After the nerd cred, you pick up the framing hammer and start the real work.
In metric it’s easy to divide by 20 or 50. Still, the drawing board my father used as a civil engineer only had double-sided ones (1:1 and 1:50).
So, decifeet, deci-inches and centi-inches.
That’s actually an engineering scale. No standard Architectural scales use decimal inches.
Or diameter tape
I’m just now realising British tape measures are probably pretty unique in that they typically come with one side metric, one side imperial
Every other tape measure I have has both. I bought this one with the intention of achieving as much precision as reasonably possibly. If I’m going for precision I’m going metric. Also in almost every other situation I use metric. Not a single fucking tape measure at Home Depot has metric anymore.
If you want precision you should use a ruler.
Sure, but the longest one I have is 12 inches, which is good enough for most of the stuff I measure but I’ve been making big stuff for my new client.
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Not that uncommon. In Canada you can buy metric, imperial, or dual-unit tapes. People who use them routinely at work will buy single-unit tapes so they don’t have to check which side they’re on. Dual units are handy for us mortals who use them infrequently and need both.
These are annoying as hell. You can’t pick a system and then just go because you always end up measuring with both sides of the tape depending on how things are oriented, so now you have one side that isn’t useful.
Just get a metric tape when you need a metric tape and vice versa. The dual tapes are for housewives.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer a simply metric one, it’s just I think there’s still a generally* generational divide here between metric and imperial, so your standard hardware shop seems to stock the dual measurement kind.
*Interestingly around my age (mid/early-millennial) some people use imperial for measuring their height & similar measurements and metric for most other things. I’m not sure how far back and forward that behaviour goes
You don’t want to go down that road in Canada. We’ve had the metric system for 50 years now and the way we measure things around here is schizophrenic.
There’s 3 systems; imperial, metric, and time. And you might measure the same thing in all three depending on the magnitude of the measurement. Very short distances are in mm and cm, a little more is in inches and feet (height, carpentry), then miles because our rural road grid is laid out in miles, then kilometers because the highway is all signposted in metric, then minutes and hours because the distance between towns and cities isn’t relevant when you account for weather.
“Barrhead is about 2 hours north, when you get to the end of town, go 20km until you get to a 4 ways stop. Go 4 miles north and turn left. About 200 meters from the corner will be a driveway, turn in there and about 40 feet in you’ll want to park and walk from there.”
That hurts my brain. I only speak one language, too though, so my brain prolly just isn’t very plastic
Trust me, most of the people in Barrhead only speak one language, or less. :-)