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.
Conspiracy theory: they have loose tolerances at the assembly line. They are all checked if they meet the certification criteria. The ones that do gets the paper and the stamp and the ones that don’t go in the other bin and are sold without a cert.
That’s a possibility but assuming they all come off the same assembly line then I feel like they should be relatively consistent. My colleague has a tape measure that is “class 1”, which means it has at most 1.1mm deviation over 10m. I’m hoping to compare the two, we’ll see.
Edit: that actually seems less likely now that I think about it. The tape measures that are certified are certified by NIST, which is not cheap. If Starrett knew that many of them would not meet the spec then I don’t think they would attempt to certify all of them. If a business wants to pay the money to have certified tape measures than I think they probably want some traceability for the precision of their measurements.
They could measure themselves and just send the ones that meet the criteria for certification by someone else. Anyway it’s a funny tinfoil theory and they are probably all good quality.
Yeah good point. I’ve been growing my collection of tinfoil hats lately.
Believe it or not, but this is how CPUs and other microchips are handled. For a specific architecture, the chip is tested and depending on how many cores are working and how well it performs, it will be sold as say i3, i5 or i7 (in case of Intel).
This sounds correct.