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• Looooong ruler.

• Advertising Ruler

• T0143 Triangular Ruler 15cm T0137 Steel Ruler 30cm

• Ruler 15cm

• This folding ruler is normally meant to be included in photographs documenting crime scenes, but I used it to document the size of all the objects in this book.

• This ruler has a reference edge that you hold up against a piece of wood or metal, like a T-square. There are four rows of tiny holes. Within each row the holes are spaced 1mm apart, but each row is shifted by 0.25mm relative to the one before, so there’s a hole every 0.25mm from the edge.

• Articulated Ruler

• I have not seen many of these (just this one actually). It’s an aluminum folding ruler.

• This measuring wheel has yet to be made obsolete, and probably won’t be for a long time. It’s used to measure fabric, which is pulled under the wheel, typically from one roll to another. For measuring a few or more yards (meters) of fabric, there’s really no other method that is as fast and accurate. We use this one every time we make a quilt on our quilt plotter.

• I made a map of my farm compound in 1994, almost entirely using this measuring wheel.

• Folding Rulers

• Locking articulated rulers are a clever way to transfer shapes and locations of cutouts in drywall, tile, or paneling.

• My friend Bobby, who words concrete, uses a ruler like this because he can poke it down to the bottom of a form to measure the height more easily than with a tape measure.

• Larger Dental Ruler

• At the opposite end of the size spectrum, this tiny map measuring wheel uses the same principle to measure distances on printed maps. Useful for planning trips…if civilization collapses and you don’t have your phone’s GPS and maps app anymore.

• This is simpler even than a folding ruler: a two-part ruler that slides out to become almost twice its closed length.

• Engineer’s Rulers have finer divisions, making them actually quite a pain to use unless you really need that much precision. This one has inches on one side and centimeters on the other.

• T0136 Aluminum Ruler 24"

• A ruler with a lip on one end is useful for accurately measuring in from an edge.

• This simple wooden scribe, a type of caliper, is used to mark a line a constant distance from one edge of a piece of wood. A brass insert helps it slide smoothly.

• This ruler is meant to work particularly well as a straight edge, for cutting or drawing lines. We use it for cutting cloth with a rotary cutter.

• Maybe whoever invented slap rulers had a section of their tape measure break off, and realized that it would be useful on its own. Because that’s what they are: short pieces of convex/concave steel tape, coated in rubber and decorated for grade school students.

• This ruler sticks to the wall so you can put your child up against it every few months and say “my goodness how much you’ve grown”. Also useful for telling how deep the floodwaters were. T0111 Tape Measure] These paper tape measures are handed out free at IKEA furniture stores. There is truly no limit to how cheap a tape measure can be!

• This “linen tester” is a magnifying glass mounted over a small inch-scale ruler. You set it on a piece of cloth and count how many threads per inch in each direction.

• This one is for measuring the length and angle of eyelashes. Why does it exist? You tell me.

• Standard Chalk Line

• Rulers and straightedges are not the only way to mark a straight line. For long distances, like across a whole room, chalk lines are faster and more accurate. You stretch the string and then snap it to leave a line of chalk dust.

• Some engineer’s rulers are marked in decimal fractions of an inch (1/10th and 1/50th in this case). Later we will learn that for high-precision metal work, people don’t use fractions at all and the standard unit is a thousandth of an inch.

• Ruler With Sliding Stop

• A ruler with a slide is good for edges, and for remembering or transferring the measurement.

• Advertising Ruler

• Cheap, sometimes free rulers are the modern equivalent of the Egyptian cubit rod. About as accurate, just as useful, but now with advertising. Like many rulers in the US, they have a metric scale on one side (widely ignored) and an inch scale on the other.

• I’m not sure where to put this thing, with rulers, circle-drawing tools, or curve-measuring tools. You can use it as any of those things.

• Map Measuring Wheel

Do you have a better example of this kind of tool? Let me know by leaving a comment, and include a picture of it if you can so everyone can see!