Geoff Duncan

Today's oddity: showed an actual degreed and employed #engineer how to use a cheap #Vernier #caliper to get accurate measurements down to 0.1mm.

Caveats: engineer is much younger than me, this was an old-school caliper without a dial or digital readout, their primarily field is fluid dynamics (so not a lot of calipers). And they understood the idea quickly.

But now I'm wondering this person would panic at the sight of a #slideRule. Tempting to throw one in the bag "just in case."

Jul 14, 2023 at 9:37pmWeb
Show threadGeoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Jul 14, 2023
@geoffduncan Ha! Recently been doing vernier scales with my 5th years (~16yrs old), I still consider the ability to measure down to 0.05mm mechanically to be witchcraft.
And I also have a slide rule in my desk drawer, because dad taught me the basics when I was about 7, when he bought his first electronic calculator...his job at the time was building nuclear power stations.
Show threadGeoff DuncanJul 14, 2023

@_thegeoff
I just have one cheap shitty Vernier caliper: enough to repair/tweak instruments, nothing more.

But I'm practically swimming in slide rules (and I've been known to use them in the wild). I think I have half a dozen, all pretty high quality. Most were gifts from retirees who were surprised I knew how to use one. (As a kid I was taught by a physics professor who lived a couple doors down.) In #Seattle, before Amazon and Microsoft, there was Boeing: lots of aerospace engineers about.

Show threadGeoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Jul 14, 2023
@geoffduncan This is a book I found in a store room at work. A.W.K. " 'awkeye " Ingram was dad's high school physics teacher. And it's still a mostly useful book. The bits on cleaning mercury aren't really considered safe any more, and the "new for the 3rd edition!" electronics stuff is all valve based (yeah, amps ;), but I've found useful things for my 2023 job just browsing for 20 mins.