On 3/18/2013 1:32 PM, Tom Dacon wrote:
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.

I have two of these:

http://tinyurl.com/calg3mj

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1