Hi there! Welcome to another Friday Findings video. Today I'm going to tell you about yet
another tool that I use a lot in my jewelry making and a lot more than you might suspect
and it's this little brass caliper and it's used for well like calipers are for measuring
things, especially things in small increments. You can find one of these at most of your
jewelry crafting stores in the jewelry making aisle and it's just a sliding caliper and
it's great and very useful for measuring your jewelry making products such as beads. You
just slide a bead between the jaws and then you can see your dimension.
Now an important thing to note when using these is that your measurement is from this
line. This scribed line right here, not from the edge of the caliper so this bead as you
can see is about 8mm or if you look up here it's in inches. It's about 5/16", not measured
from over here, but the scribed in line on the caliper. When you measure beads, usually
you measure them from hole to hole. For like a round bead, this is an 8mm bead because
it's round and that's its one dimension or you might have a big ceramic bead like this one and
it's 30mm and often they'll have two measurements because it's rectangular so it's 30x22. Usually
the dimension that's given first is the one that's from hole to hole.
One thing I strongly recommend, especially if you're in the US and you're just getting
into jewelry making is that you acquaint yourself with millimeters. It's a lot easier than dealing
with fractions of an inch and most of your beads come with that dimension given and your
wire and most of these smaller components. You'll just be so much happier dealing in
millimeters and centimeters than in fractions of an inch.
Beads aren't the only thing you can measure. You can also measure wire and here's some
wire that my husband got for me out of some electronics and he told me what size it was,
but let's say I didn't know. I can use my calipers to measure it and if you take a look,
let me zoom in for you, you can see that it falls somewhere between 1-2mm, but the cool
thing is that you can actually measure up to tenths of a millimeter with these calipers.
If you see these ten little marks here after our first indicator mark, all you need to
do is find the two marks on the top and bottom that line up with each other. So in this case
I would say it's the 6 so we would say this is 1.6mm and when you're measuring something
and especially when you want to get these fine measurements, make sure you leave the
item that you want to measure in between the jaws. That will help you get more accurate.
So we know that this is 1.6mm and you can find a chart like this one that shows me,
oh yes, 1.63mm so this wire is 14 gauge.
Other things that you can measure are your tools. Like I have this set of bail making
pliers and I keep forgetting how big each of these jaws is so with my calipers I can
remember that one's 5, that one's 7, that one's 10 and with your round nose pliers,
something I'm often mentioning in the videos is to use a sharpie to mark your round nose
pliers where you want to make your loops consistent. So if I set this at 2mm and I want consistent
2mm loops, I can put this on here and then use my sharpie to make a mark, which I already
have one on here. It's faded a little and then I'll have consistent loops.
So this is a great little tool and once you get one you'll find lots more uses for it.
If you like this video, please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll
see more like it. Also up on the screen are a couple of jewelry making videos you might
just enjoy. Thanks for watching. Happy creating. Bye bye.