I found the best calculator for woodworking (provided that you HAVE to use that blody imperial system, if you are wise enough to use metric, good for you, however, you know how hard it is when all the tools and the kerfs are in imperial)....
It is the HP33S.
why is it so good? it has a way of working with fractions which makes working with inches and fractions of super easy and cool!
let me give you some example:
- You can tell the calculator to only work with 1/16. ie, every number will be displayed as X Y/16 (with Y
Yep, being french, I agree, metric is SO much better.. problem is that EVERY BLODDY thing in the US is imperial, and if you want to use metric, you still HAVE to use imperial also and do conversions in every direction. In addition, all mesuring stuff have at least imperial, and sometimes metric. and most of the time imperial on both sides (and having mesurement on both sides is quite convinient)...
as a result, except if you imported your metric tools, you are screwed in this imperialist country with an imperialist system that is realy an imperial pain in the rear end :-)
Most math I do is with pencil and paper, the other times it is a quick mental calculation. I must have inherited my grandfather's math abilities. Got A's in all my college math courses without really trying, some I did not buy the textbook just took the tests.
My personal experience is that I make a lot fewer errors with the metric system. If a measuring device cannot do metric - I won't buy it now. (taste isn't disputable.)
I bought a calculator that does fractions - that eases it a bit -- but it is too easy to have a momentary lapse and mess up when converting everything into a common base. I really got the calculator because it does simultaneous equations - but I really don't need that too often for woodworking...
Now having said that... The simplest way with fractions is to convert everything into the same base - 16th's 32'nds 64th's as appropriate and do the arithmetic that way. That way you can do it quickly in your head or with paper scraps.
Much of this calculation though is due to the fact that most plans are badly laid out -- not to drafting or engineering standards. (This is understandable since most of use are "hobbyists" lovers of the art - not drafting technicians or engineers.) So the easiest thing to do is review all the plans - establish a single common reference baseline and related points for measurements and pencil in all the variations and measurements before starting. Anytime I don't do this it's good for a few laughs or a minor wood cutting tragedy.
A related note: Beware of plans that were "drawn" by an artist. I did a couple of "simple" projects before Christmas. Only to discover that an "artist" had "drawn" the plans -- they were what he thought he saw. Unfortunately the pieces I traced all depended on meeting along a common line of reference... When I reviewed the accompanying photos and compared them to the Plans -- I mean "drawings disguised as plans" actually -- there was clearly only a cursory relationship. I was in a hurry - had never used any of his "plans" before and since the items were "so simple" - I just dived in. Several hours of corrections later I looked back... I won't even mention the name of the guy who authors all those bandsaw books - but he knows who he is. Since that accident I have been a lot more critical of the plans in my woodworking library and discovered many errors - and corrected them in case I use the idea in the future. Since I change dimensions and techniques in almost every project I had not caught many of these errors before. But when I reviewed everything I had built, sources of confusion quickly became obvious since I was now looking for them.
One other note. Not everyone realizes that calculators may be precise - but not always accurate. If you do a lot of "small angle" taper cuts - say less than 10 degrees, the calculator may or may not switch to a better algorithm for working out the sin, cos tan and inverses. Some of the formulae used may be quite inaccurate at very low degree offsets - so if you work out the Cosine or Sine from rise, run and Hypotenuse or the tangent from rise and run lengths - and then convert to degrees so you can set a saw or a taper gauge - you may get a surprise at fitting time. The better calculators now have very accurate tables embedded and interpolate to get "in between values" -- all thanks to shrinking chip sizes.
Ok Cyrille - you got your plug - I got my rant - Good Deal! And HP does make great stuff - use lots.
Le>>I found the best calculator for woodworking (provided that you HAVE to use
What, you have something against binary fractions?
To be accurate, merkins use American customary units. Many of these are the ame as Imperial units, but some are different (like the gallon).
And let's not forget that Imperial units are based on avoidupois, gee, what language is that?
.=2E.
screwed in
Het, thanks to Alexander Hamilton we at least have metric money despite heated opposition from Aaron Burr. As you may know, when Hamilton was promoting metric weights and measures that was just too much for Burr so he took Hamilton out and shot him...
I used the Calculated Industries Construction Master series of handhelds for years and found them to be very good.
I currently use their Pro Desktop Printer model, which has nice fat keys and letters, which are easier on my challenged peepers.
One of its best features is the ability to work in mixed units of measurement transparently.
We often buy vinyl film, sold in linear meters, which has a useful net width that we measure in inches, and we need the final number in square feet.
15 LM x 53.2 INCHES = 20.2692 SQUARE METERS / CONVERT TO FEET / =
218.1759 SQUARE FEET.
It is also the case that I will need to know the weight of this much vinyl, for shipping cost estimation purposes.
The unit will allow me to set and maintain constants, so that I don't need to remember or look up conversion factors.
It is also handy for the conversion of decimal units to fractions.
Our CAD people work in decimals, because it is more accurate than working in fractions but it is often useful to communicate these measurements to others in fractions.
I believe the fractions can be set down to 1/64 increments on this model.
I would love to switch to metric, but since every bit and scale that I own (including on large machines) is imperial, it would be a tough switch. It addition, I can visualize the length of an imperial measurement MUCH better than a metric length. I know how much 5" is, but to look at a piece of wood and say "12 cm", I can't do it without looking at it in inches and mutiplying it by 2.54. At that point, I'm better off with imperial.
FWIW, when I was in junior high or high school or whenever they introducted the metric system, the teachers quite confidently (beware of public school teachers who say things confidently) told us that engineers never did conversions, they just worked in one system or the other. So what happened? First engineering job I had involved a new product for a European customer, with all our test data and so on that we had to use to do the design in US Customary. Engineers don't do conversions. Yeah, right. Sure we don't.
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