Old engineering & mathmatics stuff...

[1990C4S]

^^ I think that's what I had. With a folding brown plastic cover...

I probably have it somewhere, but it died, I had two of them and neither one would work.

[SpyderMike]

Yep, mine is still intact:

[Scott Douglas]

I found this in my drawer the other day. It recently died but I liked it enough to keep it around.

[fanaudical]

I still have my HP 42s. I run the Free-42 app on my tablet. I still have Excalibur 32-bit on my work computers...

[CurtEgerer]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

Popped in this morning...



And now I guess I should always learn to use one - I actually loved the fun exercises the ancient prof made us do in chemical thermodynamics, using numbers covering over 40 orders of magnitudes with fractional powers and other fun things, only in our heads or on at best a scratchpad just to get a good guess. Understanding exponents was critical, and we got pretty darn close!

I was at the Bradbury Science Museum a few months back with several other 911 drivers There's lots to see in there!

[CurtEgerer]

You guys with the dead calculators - try percussive maintenance. It's worked for me several times.

[1990C4S]

I'm actually sad that I don't have mine now. It's 50% nostalgia, 50% pathetic/why would you care.

I carried that little thing to school for years and used it all day long.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by CurtEgerer

You guys with the dead calculators - try percussive maintenance. It's worked for me several times.

No, I don't think that will do it

[Tim Hancock]

I still use this Radio Shack EC-4014 calculator nearly daily at work. The battery has been dead for many years but the solar still powers it on. I think this was a replacement for a lost calculator near the end of college days in the mid-late 80's. I used it for many years then at my old first machine design job and still use it to this day.

[CurtEgerer]

Originally Posted by red-beard

No, I don't think that will do it

I'm only half kidding. It's worked for me on many cameras, watches, handheld video games and other electronics. Recently bought a race scanner and a handheld Garmin GPS at a garage sale. Neither worked. Until some percussive maintenance I have no idea why it works, but it occasionally does.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by CurtEgerer

I'm only half kidding. It's worked for me on many cameras, watches, handheld video games and other electronics. Recently bought a race scanner and a handheld Garmin GPS at a garage sale. Neither worked. Until some percussive maintenance I have no idea why it works, but it occasionally does.

Clearly because you're the PPOT version of...

[TimT]

I picked up one of my guitars from having a little spa type work, setup, frets polished.. noisy pots cleaned.. Got to talking with the owner about old tools and such... and since we hit it off he gave me a ruler that he got from an old timer who work at DuPont..

Interestingly it has a dimension correction for temp, however, it doesn't indicate the temp..

9/32in/ft on a 2 foot rule

[masraum]

Originally Posted by TimT

I picked up one of my guitars from having a little spa type work, setup, frets polished.. noisy pots cleaned.. Got to talking with the owner about old tools and such... and since we hit it off he gave me a ruler that he got from an old timer who work at DuPont..

Interestingly it has a dimension correction for temp, however, it doesn't indicate the temp..

9/32in/ft on a 2 foot rule

Very cool, shrink rulers. I've seen a several for sale in the past couple/few months on an "old tool" sales group that I frequent. They are very interesting, although I suspect I'm unlikely to ever come up with a good reason to use one. Best thing that I could think of today would be if I could give someone one to use for a specific project on April 1st.

[rwest]

Here’s my Casio from HS. Would have been mid 80’s, so 40 years old! Still works fine, although the spline of the case has a split in it, the ribbon cable going between the sides is good.

[TimT]

Also the rule I was just gifted has 10th of inches on one side, and 50ths on the other.. yet the temp correction is given as a fraction (32nds)

[masraum]

Originally Posted by TimT

Also the rule I was just gifted has 10th of inches on one side, and 50ths on the other.. yet the temp correction is given as a fraction (32nds)

Interesting!

[gwmac]

Shrink rulers were used by pattern makers,

[1990C4S]

we used to eff around with people and give them shrink rulers without telling them. The other prank was to loan out the 'production' stopwatch. It looked like minutes/seconds but it was minutes and hundreds of minutes.

So 1:50 was actually 1M 30S. It made people panic about their machine cycle time.