LAB/SCHOOL

Our coolest ruler, hands down. It’s dark blue plastic, T-shaped, and packed with information. It’s an American Wire Gauge and a screw-size gauge. It measures UTS and ISO screw pitch, has SMD capacitor info, conversion scales, transistor and diode diagrams. It has a list of SI prefixes, digital logic gates, logic identities, electrical units and abbreviations, colors and wavelengths, transmission line equations, a protractor, a breadboard and tons more. If you’re not into that stuff, use it a 13”/33cm ruler. Measures 15" x 6-1/4” x 1/16" overall, and you might need a magnifier to read some of it. Made in the USA.

Our each is a package of (2) steel tech rulers. One is 6” x 1/32” for the first 2-1/2” then 1/64” for the next 1/2” then 1/16” for the last 3”. The other is 150mm x 0.5mm. Both have sliding markers/pocket clips, and both have mm:inch tables on the reverse side. You’ll need excellent eyesight.

It’s a cornucopia of stencils. All shapes, no alphabets. You’ll get a profusion of (8) clear acrylic stencil sheets, including: a raft of ovals; a preponderance of squares; a farrago of circles, hexagons, pentagons and triangles; a collection of a bunch of shapes, including trapezoids; a roomful of interior design shapes; a melange of electronic symbols; and an assortment we can’t altogether identify, but might be for printed circuit design. All have mm rules along at least one edge.

Vying for the Two-Really-Useful-Things-In-One Award, this 12-inch clear acrylic ruler is also a 2X magnifier! A red alignment strip runs right through the vaulted center of the ruler, which is 1-1/2” wide overall. The domed strip with the red line is about 3/4” wide. Also measures in Canadian, and at 12” long, that means 30cm.

No, these scales won’t tell you how much weight you’ve lost (you’re so disciplined!), but they will help you design something super-technical. Know why? ’Cause they’re architect’s and engineer’s scale rulers, from Helix, both (3)-sided in silver aluminum with color-coded sides. You pick: the architect’s with separate scales for 3", 1-1/2", 1", 3/4", 3/8", 3/16", 3/32" 1/2", 1/4" and 1/8" per foot, as well as a 12" ruler in 1/16" increments, all in U.S. standard; or the engineer’s, with 12", 1/10", 1/20", 1/30", 1/40", 1/50", 1/60" scales.

Geometry teacher alert. These 6" plastic protractors have a 6" x 1/16" ruler on the bottom, and measure 0-180 degrees in one-degree increments on the outer arc and 10-170 degrees and 10cm ruler on the inner side. You’ll get a quartet of them in assorted colors, including clear and translucent red and blue.