July 03, 2008

My new(est) toy - a Sine Bar

Not a strange drinking establishment - a device for accurately measuring angles.

Distance and length can be measured easily to several tens of a thousandth of an inch. Angles, not so.

With length, you can use a micrometer screw to get a fine division but for angles, you are basically looking at a pointer and an engraved scale and the best you can do is about a quarter of a degree accuracy. Unfortunately, this is not enough for some instances.

Enter a bit of geometry, a splash of trig and precise angle measurement is yours…

Wikipedia has an excellent short article explaining the process.

Here is the catalog photo of mine — a brown & sharpe:

brown_sharpe_sine_bar.jpg

Cool stuff and amazing accuracy for such a simple technique.

Posted by DaveH at July 3, 2008 06:32 PM | TrackBack
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