"Tool of the Year" Thread

I have bought an even cheaper species, the Carbon Fibre version (so they say) from Jaycar, seven whole bucks. I've got two now after having used the first for a couple of years and learning how much I can trust it. They're great for what they are, cheap and convenient to use. One sits on my lathe headstock (invaluable for roughing operations) and another sits in my living room.

I agree, this might be the tool of the year.

Nice old skool calipers there Fordman, with the old style internal measurement calibrated tips. I've been looking for something like that but it seems they're out of fashion these days. My first one was like that.
 
I knew a bulldozer mechanic whose toolbox was mainly Aldi spanners. The team serviced machinery at night. He didn't get upset if they left one behind, and nobody nicked them. He said the quality was up to the job. That was when I bought a set of their ring spanners, which I noticed was made in India.
 
I have actually used a chain! 10 sq ch to the acre. It went with an old brass vernier theodolite. With 100 links in the chain, we have an earlier form of metrication. The typical suburban street is one chain wide.

Until SI metrication rods were used to measure brickwork. (perches are used for land). 16.5 ft or four to the chain.
Deeply embedded from primary school: 5 1/2 yards = 1 rod, pole or perch. Back in the 70s I helped a friend find a house in Brisbane and was staggered to see that block sizes were all in perches, presumably square ones! It's certainly the only time in my life that I've actually come across that particular unit. Working in SA country areas, rural road reserves were pretty much all 1, 2 or 3 chains wide.

One issue with precision surveying used to be wear on the 100 links! Heroic workers, those earlier surveyors. Interesting how threads evolve - thanks Mr. Fordman.
 
Dentist's pick with interchangeable picks and a magnet at the other end.
Use it all the time as a scribe, for cleaning out washer jets and brake bleed screws,
picking up washers and nuts that you've dropped into oblivion, warding off
the clawing cat...
 
The chains had the benefit of being much more robust than long steel tapes that were rolled up. You know what happens when you twist a 3 m workshop tape - then do it to a 66 ft one. It took practice to bundle chains up (the bundle was tied in the middle) and to throw them out. Tape is easier.

The old land grants are measured metes and bounds, in chains. using landmarks like big rocks, stream beds and old trees. As old system titles are brought under the Real Property Act, and the metric system, surveyors have to sort this out. One told me he takes a stab at missing landmarks, often only an old fence remains as a clue for a subdivision, and if the adjoining owners don't object, he goes on from there. Titles have become not only based on the grant, but by subdivisions described in an old will - sometimes using even more nebulous landmarks.
 
Why does my brain find this so interesting. Some good info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rood_(unit)

It seems that the rod/rood/pole/perch/pike are ancient names with similar meanings and within a range depending on country similar more or less lengths. Also squared rods (perch) were a common area ancient unit of measurement.

Linear measurement:
rod = rood = pole = perch = lug = 25 link = 16 1/2 Ft = 5 1/2 yard
Chain = 100 link = 4 rod = 66 Ft = 22 yard
Furlong = 40 rod = 10 Chain
Mile = 8 Furlong = 80 Chain

Area:
1 square rod = 1 perch
1 rood = 40 rod x 1 rod = 40 perch = 1/4 Acre
1 acre = 160 rood = 10 square chain
1 square mile - 640 acre

I recall when I was in Sri Lanka in 2019 seeing real estate listings using perch as the unit of area and thinking it was a left over from the British era. Apparently also Queensland used perch as an area measurement for older urban allotments.
 
The system is consistent, but names for the rod (or square rod) varied by "trade". The units were based on long traditional and practical land sizes. Gunter's chain with divisions of 100 and 10 was reconciled with the old measure, which was often based on 4, hence 4 rods to the chain or 4 roods to the acre.

A cricket pitch is a chain long. The traditional 55 yard swimming pool is 2 1/2 chains long (50.3 metres or 10 rods).

I found a photo of a weathered chain wrapped so it doesn't tangle, and can be thrown out cleanly - it was nothing like the museum display. Some of the tags at every 10 links can be seen. The chain man carried steel spikes with a ribbon on top to stab into the ground to mark required points.
chain.jpg
 
The British system was unified by law in the Middle Ages - Magna Carta requires a single system.

France before the revolution had a bewildering array of local systems, and they didn't equate to British ones despite the names (eg perch vs perche).

I think the need to clean this up led to the metric system, which, typical of revolutionaries, ignored long established practical trade measurements. (What possible practical use is a ten millionth part of the distance from the equator to the pole, and why is it special?).
 
It was an early attempt at defining measuring units relying on natural constants rather than monarchs' will, which the frenchies realised would make it easy for anyone to repeat the experiment and derive the measuring unit accurately anywhere anytime with minimal means.

Modern units are constantly revised so we're getting closer and closer to this ideal and it was realised that some of the physical constants the system relies on had to be changed to reverse the relationship between these values and the units we use to express them. Recently (2019), the Planck constant was changed so it has a finite number of significant digits. Being expressed in kg*m^2/s, with both metre and second defined by natural processes as well (speed of light and atomic energy level transitions) leaves the kilogram to be derived such that it fits with this value, rather than setting the kilogram to some arbitrary value and then calculating a value for the Planck constant that would depend on this number (which was a variable itself due to the nature of the standard).

See more here:


I had to find some drillholes drilled in the early forties using some rudimentary maps where everything was measured in chains and asking around I found nobody knew what chains were. I did find them, so now they're in a proper report with GPS coordinates. What surprised me was that the samples were still there though mostly washed away but still clearly visible, which tells you how slowly some environments recover (here I put it down to low relief energy - which is to say the land is too flat to give runoff water enough energy to carry away stuff you leave lying about and natural rainfall is too low to move it anyway). Environmentalists do have a point but I doubt most of them know this.
 
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You made the mistake of asking people either too young to remember, or not from farming families. Someone my age could have found them faster in chains than using GPS.

The new physics standards are only a way of accurately accommodating the revolutionaries' system. Almost anything could have been found for use as a natural standard, but the revolutionary ideologues were not in a mind to be practical, or to accommodate regular usage. The foot, yard, etc are "natural" if not always accurately or internationally defined, which is likely why they lasted for centuries. Fields were never divided in hectares.

If the French hadn't made war on most of Europe and brought their new ways to occupied territories the system would have died from lack of adoption. Notice what the revolution did to the calendar. Practical came last in their thinking.
 
This is a much more interesting article, with a sentence of history to each measurement in various catagories: length, area, weight dry/wet volume, administrative units. For example, I now understand why the Imperial and US gallons are different, Imperial is based on the "ale" gallon, the US is based on the "wine" gallon.

 
This is a much more interesting article, with a sentence of history to each measurement in various catagories: length, area, weight dry/wet volume, administrative units. For example, I now understand why the Imperial and US gallons are different, Imperial is based on the "ale" gallon, the US is based on the "wine" gallon.


The Queen Anne gallon is NOT as described: "equal to the US customary gallon" it is the exact Queen Anne gallon that was used throughout the British Empire before the war of independence and never changed in the USA because they never adopted the "imperial" gallon legalised in 1824.
 
It was an early attempt at defining measuring units relying on natural constants rather than monarchs' will, which the frenchies realised would make it easy for anyone to repeat the experiment and derive the measuring unit accurately anywhere anytime with minimal means.

Modern units are constantly revised so we're getting closer and closer to this ideal and it was realised that some of the physical constants the system relies on had to be changed to reverse the relationship between these values and the units we use to express them. Recently (2019), the Planck constant was changed so it has a finite number of significant digits. Being expressed in kg*m^2/s, with both metre and second defined by natural processes as well (speed of light and atomic energy level transitions) leaves the kilogram to be derived such that it fits with this value, rather than setting the kilogram to some arbitrary value and then calculating a value for the Planck constant that would depend on this number (which was a variable itself due to the nature of the standard).

See more here:


I had to find some drillholes drilled in the early forties using some rudimentary maps where everything was measured in chains and asking around I found nobody knew what chains were. I did find them, so now they're in a proper report with GPS coordinates. What surprised me was that the samples were still there though mostly washed away but still clearly visible, which tells you how slowly some environments recover (here I put it down to low relief energy - which is to say the land is too flat to give runoff water enough energy to carry away stuff you leave lying about and natural rainfall is too low to move it anyway). Environmentalists do have a point but I doubt most of them know this.
We do need a coffee catchup. I remember working on old geochemical survey maps of creek lines only (nothing else available) at a scale of 2 miles to the inch. Wonderful stuff....
 
You made the mistake of asking people either too young to remember, or not from farming families. Someone my age could have found them faster in chains than using GPS.

The new physics standards are only a way of accurately accommodating the revolutionaries' system. Almost anything could have been found for use as a natural standard, but the revolutionary ideologues were not in a mind to be practical, or to accommodate regular usage. The foot, yard, etc are "natural" if not always accurately or internationally defined, which is likely why they lasted for centuries. Fields were never divided in hectares.

If the French hadn't made war on most of Europe and brought their new ways to occupied territories the system would have died from lack of adoption. Notice what the revolution did to the calendar. Practical came last in their thinking.

Provided you knew where the old local chain grid lay. That was the problem. There was no reference to any landmarks or anything that still exists today.

Yeah, you could say a grain of barley could have been a better natural standard, but history proves it wasn't though you might argue it accommodated regular usage better. Standards are necessary for transferring information, which was becoming a problem given the industrial revolution (surprisingly the english didn't figure that out).

Time is a much more esoteric concept and standardisation of time had been taken care of by the relatively similar life cycle the world over based on reliable and reliably measurable natural cycles so the work we're doing today with other measuring units was sort of done already hence no real need to change. The Romans did some work in formalising the calendar long before the french and being practical (as you suggest one should be when undertaking such endeavours) they got it pretty much spot on. Current efforts to re-align natural constants with measuring units reflect current thinking about what is of the essence and what is not and emphasise that. The practicality may not be immediately obvious but it is clearly explained in videos like the one I linked above.

On another slant we moved from measuring land to interstellar distances and atomic radii, so practicality has evolved.
 
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We do need a coffee catchup. I remember working on old geochemical survey maps of creek lines only (nothing else available) at a scale of 2 miles to the inch. Wonderful stuff....

My 194? map didn't have anything but a local grid in chains and a North. No scale (let alone a graphic as usual with these things scale may have helped nada, because the map itself was a photocopy so no idea of the real scale anyway). A numeric scale would have been just as meaningless. Current (at the time) tenement boundaries weren't present either.
 
The Queen Anne gallon is NOT as described: "equal to the US customary gallon" it is the exact Queen Anne gallon that was used throughout the British Empire before the war of independence and never changed in the USA because they never adopted the "imperial" gallon legalised in 1824.
Hi Kim.

I don't understand the point you are making. It seems to me that the Queen Anne (wine) gallon was in use in both UK & the American colonies and was (and still is) the same volume. Later on the UK adopted and standardised on the larger volume of the imperial (Ale) gallon, and the USA retained the what they had been using, to become the US customary gallon. Extract below from Wiki link I posted previously

"The wine gallon was re-established by Queen Anne in 1707 after a 1688 survey found the Exchequer no longer possessed the necessary standard but had instead been depending on a copy held by the Guildhall.[citation needed] Defined as 231 cubic inches, it differs from the later imperial gallon, but is equal to the United States customary gallon."

Would you feel better if the above said: "the US customary gallon is equal in volume to the Queen Anne gallon." ?
 
Hi Kim.

I don't understand the point you are making. It seems to me that the Queen Anne (wine) gallon was in use in both UK & the American colonies and was (and still is) the same volume. Later on the UK adopted and standardised on the larger volume of the imperial (Ale) gallon, and the USA retained the what they had been using, to become the US customary gallon. Extract below from Wiki link I posted previously

"The wine gallon was re-established by Queen Anne in 1707 after a 1688 survey found the Exchequer no longer possessed the necessary standard but had instead been depending on a copy held by the Guildhall.[citation needed] Defined as 231 cubic inches, it differs from the later imperial gallon, but is equal to the United States customary gallon."

Would you feel better if the above said: "the US customary gallon is equal in volume to the Queen Anne gallon." ?

Exactly the only point I was trying to make. Chicken and egg.
 
last most valuable tool usage when working for me was aldi camera probe tool.usefull for viewing injector seating in cylinder heads on buses where access was limited.also used to photo carbon buildup in inlet manifold and ports of scania buses, tried to justify cause of power loss in scania buses to boss with alternative mindset, to no avail. also found mobile phone handy for taking photos of a/c,heater faults on roofs of buses to same know all boss, he found it hard to deny photo evidence in front of him of coolant leaks, faulty a/c fans etc. this guy had worked for the same company for thirty years and had a terrible mindset.......jim
 
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