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Scale on a Rabone Rule

A

Andy Kev.

Nordic Pine
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If you have a look at the first picture on this Rabone rule which is for sale,

https://www.oldhandtools.co.uk/new-arri ... xwood-rule

you can see divisions above the main inch markings which appear to be quarters and halves of an inch but they are sequentially numbered e.g. 30 32 etc.

I can see what they are but am completely baffled as to what they are for. I presume they are particular to some trade. Does anyone know what they are supposed to do?
 
Americans do that thing of buying their "lumber" in quarter inch increments.....so 5 quarters sawn boards are 1-1/4" thick. That might be a rule for measuring boards thicknesses in a saw mill or "lumber"yard. I'm only guessing.
 
Yes and it takes a bit of getting used to! This is a strange one though, there are 11 whatever they are's in 5 inches, and at the other end of the rule it goes backwards from 24 downwards. and there is another scale next to it which is full inches but always two less than it actually is.
Not the foggiest but I bet somebody on here will be along in a minute who does know.
 

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I'd guess those are for scale drawings, half, quarter and eighth of full size.
And maybe it makes sense for the numbers to start at the 1" mark, not the tip, as you'd either be placing dividers or holding the rule on edge and making a tick mark with a pencil.
Proof needs someone with the right catalogue to match it in and something better than a dodgy mobile signal on a phone...
 
This is a fascinating and perhaps even slightly sad case of the loss of knowledge in action.

The use of the scale was clearly not mainstream as AndyT would have known for sure.

Sometimes one hears of Architects' Rules. Could this be an example?
 
Now I've had a closer look I can see it's one third, one quarter and half scales.

My reply was a bit tentative, as the whole field of rules and their markings is a huge special field that I've never studied in detail.

But I don't think it's much of a stretch to see this as being useful to many trades.

If you wanted to design a piece of furniture, to get the details right, or to show to a customer, all those scales could be useful. You don't need to do any maths; you just think in inches and pick up the required distance of the right place.

Having the zero mark on the rule, not at the tip, means that you can easily set the point of your dividers into the bit with finer divisions, which show fractions of an inch. There's no need for the whole rule to be cluttered up with fine divisions all the way along.

Some of the old textbooks that Trevanion has posted about have quite detailed descriptions of how to do the sort of technical drawings where a rule like this would have been useful.
 
I'd suggest it would be useful to trades like taylors and coppers where 1/3 scale could be exceptionally useful.
 
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