Ultimate digital caliper for modelers.

Greg Procter spake thus:

Whoa. Stop right there. You're the first to mention this tool: why haven't others thought of it? Well, of course, I know why: it's considered totally obsolete.

But what an elegant solution: learn to use a slide rule. Fast, simple, and plenty close enough. (I still have a couple around here from school daze long ago.)

Slide rule? Obsolete? Well, as I'm working in just one scale (at any given moment) I set the conversion scale just once and read off any decimal figure quickly. I can even set prototype inches to scale millimeters and save hundreds of key presses required of the modern calculator!

Regards, Greg.P.

Hey, I mentioned 'em. Two in fact. I called them slipsticks - what's your engineering slang for them?

Some vendors supply plastic "slip sticks" that are used to calculate a varity of things, weight of a chunk of metal, number of cement blocks in wall, yards of concrete in a floor. You enter the dimensions and they read directly in the units you are looking for. I have a bunch of them I have collected over the years and they are a lot faster to use than any computer.

John

Wolf spake thus:

Since I'm guessing that's a Canuck term, I missed that.

Never got far enough into engineering to learn the nerd slang for slide rule. Any 'Merkin terms?

Slipstick

I'd never heard it here in New Zealand.

Regards, Greg.P.

I think I first saw the term in a Robert Heinlein novel, long before I got to the point in school of actually using one. Just about that time, the pocket calculator came out.

A few relevant links

ah yes, slipstick libby. saves the family, gets hit by a meteor and dies, then get revived and becomes a woman.

That IS a merkin term. I think I still have a Log Log Decitrig Duplex tucked away in its leather scabbard in a drawer in the back room.

Actually, before I had one I used a little booklet of 5 place logs to speed up calculations. Best of all was a 15 place Kurta peppermill.

I've often thought of placing my old slide rule in a small wood frame with a glass cover and a little hammer on a chain, near the computer - "In case of power failure, ..."

Ah yes, that's a serious tool!

When I was at DePauw U. the Dean of Men was named Wedge - giving rise to continuing remarks that a wedge is the simplest of tools.

Steve Caple wrote in news:1po5u5wslt1av$.12myfku2xzzbo$. snipped-for-privacy@40tude.net:

Yeah. as a rally navigator, I used a peppermill . It was a great step forward over a slipstick. It was more compact and in a Mini Cooper, one needed all tha space one could get.

I still have my Stevens Rally Calculator circular slide rule, but the Halda Twinmaster is long gone. Wasn't a lot of extra room in an Alfa, either.

According to David Nebenzahl :

I grew up calling them that same term -- and I grew up in South Texas. It *is* an American term (at least), and probably in several other English-speaking cultures as well.

As a matter of fact, the (supposed) MIT football cheer (from at least as far back as the late 1950s) went:

E to the X dU dX E to the X dX Secant, Tangent, Cosine, Sine 3.14159 Square Root of the Integral of dUV Slipstick Sliderule MIT

(The minor fact that MIT never had had a football team does not negate the cheer. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Nope -- *that* is what you do with an Abacus (Chinese) or Soroban (Japanese). I have one of each. Those are also digital computers. (You can even see the bits. :-)

The slipstick is an analog computer. :-)

DoN. Nichols spake thus:

No, but they had ... wait for it ... veering back on-topic (oh, no!): a hell of a model railroad club!