Your tape measure
- Thread starter Stingo
- Start date
Sailfree
Well-known member
On building site early in my career we used 100' steel tapes.
The company complained about the cost of replacing damaged ones and sent every site a steel tape repair kit.
About 6 months later HO insisted all tape repair kits were returned to HO.
It was difficult to find out why but info did finally sneak out that on one site a tape had been repaired with 1 foot missing. All dimensions sub 30 feet were accurate but all dimension greater than 30 feet were 1 foot short.
I believe the site slab had to be extended and a few RC columns demolished.
Most interesting problem I encountered was the setting out of the Swanley Bypass n 1964. Engineer completed setting out and next day the Council Resident Engineer checked it and said it was wrong. This was repeated 3 times over a number of days until they realised that although the line and curves looked smooth, first thing in the morning a farmer was moving the lot by eye to give himself more land.
The company complained about the cost of replacing damaged ones and sent every site a steel tape repair kit.
About 6 months later HO insisted all tape repair kits were returned to HO.
It was difficult to find out why but info did finally sneak out that on one site a tape had been repaired with 1 foot missing. All dimensions sub 30 feet were accurate but all dimension greater than 30 feet were 1 foot short.
I believe the site slab had to be extended and a few RC columns demolished.
Most interesting problem I encountered was the setting out of the Swanley Bypass n 1964. Engineer completed setting out and next day the Council Resident Engineer checked it and said it was wrong. This was repeated 3 times over a number of days until they realised that although the line and curves looked smooth, first thing in the morning a farmer was moving the lot by eye to give himself more land.
BobnLesley
Well-known member
Better yet, use a rigid ruler
BobnLesley
Well-known member
As a seventeen year old (so cheap to employ) I got dispatched to remeasure and metricate the grounds maintenance areas on Catterick Garrison in conjunction with a representative of the current landscaping contractor - it hadn't been re-measured in over thirty years - calculating the area of every piece of public/open grass and counting up any obstructions to a ride-on mowing machine therein.
It was always going to be a tedious and soul destroying task but wasn't helped when after working on it for more than a week, I discovered that the 100m tape that we were using (generously provided by the contractor as I only had a 30m one) had an 8m section missing; it went directly from 7 - 16m. What really got me was how they'd done it (apparently an accident) as there was no cut/join/repair evident, just 8-15m missing.
One - possibly the only - thing that I learnt during those weeks was how to accurately pace out distances; no more tape measures for me after that, if the contractor wanted to contest one of my measures, I had a cigarette while he used the tape (mine!) and did it on his own and almost 50 years later I can still pace out distances to an accuracy of 2-3% on flattish ground
MontyMariner
Active member
It's amazing what is obvious to some is a revelation to others.
It took me a long time to realise that the Imperial scale on vernier calipers came in two flavours - Decimals of an inch and Fractions of an inch: 1/124. In my defence, I mostly use the metric scale
Fr J Hackett
Well-known member
It amazes me people use tape measures for relatively small dimensions, pencils with a 2mm point and expect to get reproducible results.
earlybird
Well-known member
To answer the original question; it might be a metric cubit.
DanTribe
Well-known member
Nah, it will never catch on!
Stemar
Well-known member
Might have been if I had been on the contract
Never leave anything like that to an italian
