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drawing scale reading digital vernier caliper ?

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21 Apr 2010
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Tyrone
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Well, its a weird one. Anyone ever heard of vernier caliper that can be set to read to set scale ?
1:10, 1:20, 1:50, 1:250 etc ?

Mostly to check paper drawings that are printed to said scales ?
Yes, i know how to read vernier, and yes, i do have a scale ruler, and also yes, i can math :D but that's besides the point (i'm lazy, yeah).
 
I can't see the point.

But if you must, try a digital or analogue map wheel, aka distance finder.
 
Bought a DVC once and it got sent back immediately.
No two readings on the same item were ever the same.
It fluctuated 0.7 either side of zero even when parked on the bench.
 
well, this is the "why" - i get a lot of incomplete drawings (of known scale), as in measurements missing (or present on other drawings in the set i dont have access to).
For now i do with scale ruler, but it would be miles faster to just set a digital vernier to needed scale to get missing measurements.

Working in a shop that uses ancient methods for modern production, as in paper drawings, which are done in cad and sent over email in form of pdf to be printed on our end. I requested DWGs (Autocad drawing file format) but for whatever reason i cant get them... Prolly some legal bs.
I dont have any control over this, so the fastest way would be to scale vernier the whole damn thing... Its frustrating, hence me looking for other solutions.

If i had a digital drawing, there wouldn't even be a question on how to go about things even without any measurements stated, as i would be able to just pull them from geometry in the drawings.

As for "not to scale from drawings" - tough ****, as this is the only method i have to get stuff programmed into my cnc, which is what i do in said shop (cnc programmer/setter/operator). Gah... The stories i could tell... :D

The whole thing came about when i had to reproduce a compound arc of multiple radii with only radii stated, but no centers defined, no references whatsoever, except overall dimension of the arc and floating radii. So what i did was just plop down an ellipse that fit overall shape best. I consider it a bs way of doing things, but this just may be me - I hate the "read the mind/guess the thing" sort of working.
 
Some newer PDFs can be converted to dwgs.
As long as pdf is not sent over in bitmap form it would be doable, except the pc i work on is ancient, autocad is also ancient.

I do that for lasercutting/engraving in my shed a lot (former signmaker, know my way around vector graphics in general).
 
Then you're limited to importing the pdf as an image and then scaling it to suit, then measuring point to point, rather than properly converting PDF to dwg.
 
I used to use Foxit PDF reader that had a distance measured and somewhere that the scale could be set so when you performed a measure it produced a value that had already had the math done..
This must have been at least 10 years ago, so I'd hesitate to guarantee the functionality is still available. ChatGPT asserts it is and also points out that measuring is a common functionally of pdf readers..
 

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