Why These Were In Every Tool Box | Pinch Rods 

Fascinating info, well presented. Bravo! Some thoughts: 1. There is a flaw with that tape measure corner jig: it centers the corner on the *CENTER* of the tape, rather than the edge. That will introduce some error, as you can only measure on the edges. The whole thing needs to be shifted one side or the other for fully accurate measurement. 2. It occurred to me that a 'story tape' would be an excellent addition to your shop. It is nothing more than a blank tape measure that has a tape surface you can write on. Lee Valley sells them. As they don't cost a lot, you could keep a couple *dozen* of them in a drawer--one for each large project. Do those make sense?

@@KeithOlson The tape measure end is for checking diagonals to see if a box is square not for getting an accurate measurement. In use all you need to do is verify both diagonals are the same and by going off the center and using the edge of the tape to get a number it will be very accurate.

@@reedplanes728 My OCD screams "NOOOOO!!!!!"

Ha, as a quality auditor by trade, I approve that message. Everything is correct as long as you don't measure it!

Better is the enemy of good enough.

Muttered the engineer about to forget about thermal expansion

Close enough for government work..

My spouse, who works in repeatable procedures and measures flaws in thousandths of an inch (he’s an industrial inspector) would break out in hives. But we’re right. 😁

LOL that sounds about right!

A storystick or a pinchrod useful are in specific cases, nowadays there are plenty of tools available that are equally (or better) accurate but overall better in quality of use. It's a fun project to make pinchrods, they're not for me.

Everyone can use what they want. I use inches because for me it is the superior system. If I need better than 1/16" accuracy I'm going to use decimal inches anyways. So there goes the fractional argument. But I find fractions handy often too.

Brilliant thanks :) made me smile too ! My Dad was a master pipefitter boiler maker & was often the foreman for similar reasons :) His "cronies" were often the iron workers ,they did start ups ,meaning the foundation was still being set so always argument between the original architects scratching their heads putting things on hold for days, without permission they would use string ,stakes & conduit ,the conduit with etching of a hacksaw blade as the "story pole" :) Not much the super can say but YES after the corner or height or stairs etc, is fixed:) A few of the first jobs I had on sites refineries, hospitals, were with old school scaffold builders, who also did things the same way :) not exactly cabinet building but safety was their BIG and main focus! felt safer with those guys than the guy with the pocket protector :) thanks for the smile and the memory :) Rick

To date the best cabinet drawers I ever made!

Used to be that a story stick was the siding installer's best friend until the aluminum steel and vinyl siding came out.

I had this same idea (especially for measuring for drawer bottoms). I thought it was novel until I saw an old Woodpeckers one-time tool version.

Oddly enough in America shoe sizes are still based on the size of a barley corn.

Indeed, more likely trammels than pinch rods. It’s also because large dividers lose precision.

That's the way calipers are intended to be used for multiple measurements. Exactly why it has the screw.

It is a fun project that can be adapted to many uses. I like using them to layout drawer pulls on drawers the same size. Check out the plans for more info.

It's fun collecting the names for these. Even in the US. They both have a couple dozen different names. And around the world there are dozens more. It's kind of interesting to learn and see the different ways people think.

@@WoodByWrightHowTo yah this kind of tool must have been around for almost as long as people have been making stuff. its nice that they are still in use. i'v never seen the dovetail bar rule you have. looks like a nice bit of work. i'm going to have a go at one in teak. i think it will run cleanly with an linseed oil dressing. :)

They can also measure around curved surfaces.

👍

No one's used the Imperial inch in lifetimes. Although it wasn't officially abolished until 1959. In 1896 (may have been 1898 I'm not looking it up now) I believe it was Johannsen defined the standard industrial inch as precisely 2.54 centimeters. Which makes converting between metric and inches trivial. You should never round but just use that figure as your operand. That will give you infinite precision. The old Imperial inch was slightly shorter and the US inch was a little longer. There was only 5 millionths difference between them though. But they were still not the same. So yeah your engineers really boned that one up. WTF did they think they should round? Were they doing these calculations on a napkin?

@@1pcfred Hey, I'm just the digital crescent wrench interpreter, not the engineers, I agree completely. I think the main issue is how many decimal places they want to use on the prints, and we only get pdf files and redraw it in cad, so they don't really double check the accuracy. Backwards, I know.... You have no clue how often we get screwed by rounding. Like for example, having a .5° tolerance on a part that calls out 84°, but the reality is more like 84.45 so they rounded down and we end up confused as to why the distance dimensions aren't adding up on the finished product. And in the metal fabrication trade it's still called imperial in some circles, though we of course also use sae and inch. Depends on what flavor you want that particular day, really

@@sgctactics I've heard the Imperial thing a lot myself. People just say it because they don't know any better and there's no penalty for being wrong either. They make a few assumptions based on what they do know. And all of that leads them to an incorrect conclusion. They know America broke away from England. They also know we call our units by the same names the English do. And they know we use the exact same inch today. All of that is true. What they don't know is neither of us use the inch we used years ago today. We both adopted the standard inch at a later date. They mistakenly assume the inch has never changed. And therein lies their error. They don't know about a guy named Carl Edvard Johansson who came up with the standard inch at the turn of the 20th century. Who was actually a Swede. So not an American or an Englishman. But when Henry Ford bought him he was compelled to become an American then. Ford was a very big fan of Carl's work. You may have heard of Jo blocks yourself. Yeah that's where they came from. Jo is short for Johansson.

@@1pcfred that I did know, and yes, that pretty much sums up why those old terms are still used. Just like many other outdated and sometimes downright incorrect terms. Like my boss still calls a planer gauge a "height gage for the press brakes", and everyone at my work calls the pierce operation for the punch presses a punch operation when a punch is the tool used to pierce. Then again, they also think a turret punch press is in fact not a punch press, but simply a turret... And drawing a print based off an existing one is apparently "reverse engineering" (them copy and paste artists, lol). I still hear the term "spud" for linkages, and mating surfaces as bezels. Same for woodworking though. A router is now a completely different tool than it's predecessor, if you could even call it that now, and my personal favorite is the "traditional grind" bowl gouge, when hooks were used for centuries before bowl gouges even became a thing. As well as other things. For example, a cup back in the day was literally just that: a cup. Not 250ml or 8oz, but just the cup you were using. Long as you used the same cup for all your measurements, it didn't matter how big it was, since the proportions would remain consistent. Grains are still used for projectile weights instead of standardized measurements as well. We just clearly have a hard time letting go of tradition. Nothing wrong with that, considering we're watching videos of woodworking techniques that are considered by most to be antiquated.. Neat fact about units of measurement while we're at it; there was a time (can't remember exactly when at the moment) when we lost the physical global standard for a meter, due to a fire if I recall right, and it took years for a new accurate one to replace it because nobody knew with absolute certainty exactly how long it needed to be. And even then we still later revised it. Same as the imperial inch though, it only changed by a ridiculously miniscule amount

@@sgctactics colloquial and or archaic terminology is often used. Some of that may be wrong but there's no malice intended. Many that use the term Imperial today do intend harm.

That is an exceptionally good book.

A piece of string can also be used to follow a road, contour, stream, etc on a map,for the same reason you give for its use in a shop, then place along the map scale to measure the distance. Learned that in the army, I wonder if they still teach that?

@@robertkelso8024 probably not since they have all their fancy tech and it saves time for training lol... it's going to be the downfall when no one can use a standard map... stick to dumb tech because it just works and will never fail :)

There are examples of them in Egyptian work. The name doesn't go any farther back because woodworking terms change constantly.

ya no one makes those anymore. you and just get antiques. there are a list of online antique tool sellers on HandToolFinder.com

@@WoodByWrightHowTo Thanks. I'll check them out.

I make them as I need them. Masking tape is a wonderful thing.

The movement of wood along the grain is almost negligible. It does expand and contract slightly. But the tools required to measure that movement or not found in the average shop.

The size of a feet? The singular of feet is foot. One foot, two feet.

that is how we roll on here. LOL

Perception is reality. You'll never experience reality so I wouldn't be too concerned about it. Actually perceiving reality is beyond us. We lack both the senses and the mental capacity. Most are so dim in fact that they don't even realize it. We wouldn't be able to function if we had to deal with the full impact of our environment. Our world is limited for good reason.

That will be a video on a couple weeks. It is the head of a 4 beam marking gauge