Adam Savage here in my cave with a spotlight on a tool that I've gotten
some questions about lately and it's specifically a measuring tool obviously
in any makerspace measuring tools abound there are tape measures there are yard
sticks there are t squares there are combination squares like this beautiful
old star at antique combination square that I love and there are rulers like
this one with inch markings that goes down to sixteenths and you can find them
at even finer gradations but what if you need to measure something that's way
under 1/32 of an inch or about 30 mm of an inch well in that case you're gonna
need something with a much finer gradation than this you're gonna need
calipers and I have some very specific feelings about calipers and that's why I
wanted to talk to you about them today this is my pair of dial calipers these
were actually made by Brown & Sharpe they're I think about 20 or 30 years old
and for years let's see where should I begin I should begin at the beginning my
first set of calipers I bought looked like these they were stainless steel and
I bought them at Fox Hardware on 4th and mission back in 1992 they were 30 bucks
which was a lot of dough to me back then but they lasted me for well over two
decades and the difference between what this can measure and what this can
measure is pretty amazing the first thing I did when I got it home as I
looked at it and I thought wow that dial is that's a hundred gradations and ten
of those is one inch so it should be able to measure something really really
small so wait a minute and I pulled out one of my hairs like this one here and I
decided to measure it with my calipers and lo I got a reading alright so when I
put this without the hair in it it goes right to the zero and when I put it with
the hair in it it shows that my hair is about one and a half thousands thick mom
your results may vary because my hair happens to be very fine thank you very
much the fact is you can read something as
thin as one thousandth of an inch thick on
things you can measure sheets of paper and shims of metal and it feels like a
brand new superpower the first time you're running around your house
measuring everything with this now there are countless kinds of calipers to
purchase and I'd like to help you with that as well because for years I use
digital calipers like these Madhu Toya calipers and if you're gonna buy digital
calipers it's hard to do better than midotaur they last forever they have
excellent battery battery life and they're super accurate and super
repeatable and best of all you can switch with a button switch between
inches and millimeters that makes them very handy but here in the cave one of
the things that bothers me is when batteries run out so I have several
digital calipers over there in my digital caliper holder but their
batteries are always dead because they sit there for months at a time without
being used this is a long way of explaining this is the TLDR
is that I now use my dial calipers almost exclusively because well being
able to read the gradations hmm should I put this there comes a moment in time as
a carpenter when you start not just measuring to a mark but you start
measuring to the side of a mark and that means am i measuring to the middle of
the mark or to the right edge or to the left edge and those little bits of
intuition about how carefully you're measuring something are part of every
makers progress in learning how big things should be and how to cut things
proper size and give tolerances to the things that you're making and for me the
dial caliper makes me a better machinist because this is what I have the
intuition for when I see the numbers it certainly makes my calculator math
easier but it makes my intuition about my tolerances and the finesse of my
machining less obvious so the dial calipers are what I go with and you're
in luck because the exact same I think probably the same even manufacturer from
25 years ago that I bought from cells these calipers on Amazon right now for
the 20 bucks that is a fantastic price drop from thirty to nineteen ninety two
dollars one of my favorite things in the shop and it
felt like one of those it felt like progressing from adolescence to like
young adulthood as a maker to buy my first set of calipers I hope you feel
the same way