The new job is necessitating the use of a tape measure quite a bit, and my last 16' tape bit the dust last week. I typically buy Stanley 33-116 tapes because they're light-weight (.75" tape versus 1.0" typical). But stand o ut seems to be rearing it's ugly head, so I went with a beefier one this ti me. I got the Dewalt 16-footer (DWHT33372). What I *especially* like is t he 1/8" marks along the bottom of the tape - this helps with my dyslexic mo ments for sure. Also, the scale is only in 16ths - even for the first foot . On the Stanley 33-116 it has annoying 32nds the first 12 inches. Who re ally measures to a 64th with a tape? In any event, so far so good with the Dewalt.
Also on the subject of tapes, do most of you do your marking along an edge of a board, or "in the middle"? The reason I ask is because when I'm cutti ng 2x material on a heavily-used 12" scms I sort of feel like I can cut in half any angular error on "square to square" cuts. Is this silly? JP