This may be common knowledge, but I felt like I reinvented the wheel, again!
I was measuring a long offcut 2x8 seeing if I could retask it for nefarious porpese.
It was well over 8' long, and my folding rule was a mere 6' fully unfolded.
So, laid out from one end, sure enough, I was some distance short of the full board length.
When, what to my wonderous eyes and mind did appear? A simple yet brilliant feature of the rule!
If you ever noticed, one side of the folding rule is marked in increasing increments, 1, 2, 3 etc. If you flip the rule over, why it was decreasing!?!? 72, 71, 70 etc.
In all these years, I just accepted that as some sort of, well, saw nib mystery.
But wait, here comes the good part. As you may recall, in my adventure of measuring, my 6' rule was shy of the ~8' board.
Well, I held my magic pointer finger at the 5' mark, I fliped the rule over, and slid it down to the other end of the board.
Suddenly, as if some wood sprite blessed me, I found out that I had a simple measure to the far end.
So, flipped over ,and slid down, I found that I now had 2' 5 3/8", added to my 5', bingo! Using math that I excel at, I now knew my board was 7' 5 3/8" long.
Ta. Da.
This might make sense, the first line is reading the rule left to right, the second shows it flipped over.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This, depending on fonts and the magic of formatting, you might measure a total of 17 units.
Well, I hope I have entertained and enlightened at least myself with this tale. This will al be featured in my upcoming novel, "1001 Patently Obvious Tips and Tricks".
Jim
I was measuring a long offcut 2x8 seeing if I could retask it for nefarious porpese.
It was well over 8' long, and my folding rule was a mere 6' fully unfolded.
So, laid out from one end, sure enough, I was some distance short of the full board length.
When, what to my wonderous eyes and mind did appear? A simple yet brilliant feature of the rule!
If you ever noticed, one side of the folding rule is marked in increasing increments, 1, 2, 3 etc. If you flip the rule over, why it was decreasing!?!? 72, 71, 70 etc.
In all these years, I just accepted that as some sort of, well, saw nib mystery.
But wait, here comes the good part. As you may recall, in my adventure of measuring, my 6' rule was shy of the ~8' board.
Well, I held my magic pointer finger at the 5' mark, I fliped the rule over, and slid it down to the other end of the board.
Suddenly, as if some wood sprite blessed me, I found out that I had a simple measure to the far end.
So, flipped over ,and slid down, I found that I now had 2' 5 3/8", added to my 5', bingo! Using math that I excel at, I now knew my board was 7' 5 3/8" long.
Ta. Da.
This might make sense, the first line is reading the rule left to right, the second shows it flipped over.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This, depending on fonts and the magic of formatting, you might measure a total of 17 units.
Well, I hope I have entertained and enlightened at least myself with this tale. This will al be featured in my upcoming novel, "1001 Patently Obvious Tips and Tricks".
Jim
