"Tom Dacon" wrote in
:

I used to have a nice little 4-inch plastic caliper, with both decimal
and fractional rings on the dial. It lived in the breast pocket of my
shop apron, and was a really convenient size for woodworking. I'm sure
that it didn't have the absolute accuracy that my metal calipers do,
but it was always at hand and accurate enough for woodworking. Then
one day, somewhere along the line, it went missing and no matter how I
searched for it I never found it. And NOBODY sells anything like it
nowadays, at least with a fractional dial. I've spent hours on the web
trying to find someone who still sells it. No dice.

So I decided to finally step up into the 21st century, and bought a
4-inch fractional digital caliper from Rockler.

And it's just about useless to me. I've tried to use it, but when the
thing tells me that what I'm measuring is say 55/128ths, there's no
way that my mind can turn that into "just a skosh under 7/16ths". With
a dial caliper, of course, it's obvious. So I go for a 6-inch metal
caliper nowadays, even though I can't carry it around in my pocket
like the little one.

But then yesterday I had reason to measure a router bit shank which I
couldn't tell visually was 3/8th or 8mm, and I got out the digital
caliper. And you guessed it.

The damned battery was dead.

So to hell with it.

Tom



I've got one of these:
http://www.woodcraft.com/product/202...-dual-display-
fractional-digital-caliper.aspx

It reads in both decimal and fractional inch (64ths), but it only
displays the fractional inch if within a certain tolerance. Sure would
be nice if it displayed the indication all the time with an up or down
arrow if it was close to another measurement.

I haven't changed the batteries yet, and it's more than a month old.
Don't have to remove them either, unlike the other digital caliper I
have.

Puckdropper
--
Make it to fit, don't make it fit.