we all use measuring tapes i think they're compact and they're handy and they're full of clever little features that can really make your job a lot easier that is if you know how to use them today i'll give you what i think is the most comprehensive list of hidden measuring tape features that you will find anywhere even if you've seen some of these before watch until the end you will learn something new about your measuring tape the very design of the measuring tape is really a marvel it has to be flexible enough to roll up in this compact case but rigid enough to extend away from you so the tape itself is bent into an arch like shape this makes it rigid in one direction and weak in the up keep this in mind as you use it as you extend the tape it must remain upright to stay rigid if you're careless about it and you turn it to the side the tape will collapse use this to your advantage if you want to measure to a point several feet away from you don't walk all the way over there and put the tab on the end of the object everyone on the job site's going to laugh at you instead throw your tape to it this is done by pulling the tab in a quick smooth motion it takes a little practice but you can usually get four to six feet depending on the tape which means you can be at the end of an eight foot board and a couple motions and save half a mile of walking over the course of a day some people have turned this into an art but to go this far you'll need a really loose spool with a stiff tape and a lot of time to practice the downside of a tape's arch-like shape is its inability to measure curved objects with any real accuracy but there are a couple ways around this one method is to wrap the object with a string then measure the string another option is to get a flat back measuring tape believe it or not once you have one of these you'll wonder how you lived without it it's one of my favorite measuring tapes in my shop i'll link to this and some of the other really cool specialty tapes that i use in the description area below this video i'll also pin them to the top of the comment section where you can find them easily some of the best measuring tape secrets can help you do math let's say i want to find the center of a work piece instead of dividing an odd fractional number like 8 and 7 8 in half i'll angle the tape to an even number like 10 and divide that in half to find the center the same method may be used to divide something into multiple equal parts nine is easily divided into three sections of three twelve is easily divided into four sections of three and so on if you simply want to divide a rough measurement in half such as 38 inches fold the tape over on itself placing the tab on the 38 and you'll find half that number 19 at the bend a similar tip allows you to quickly subtract one measurement from another such as five and a quarter from twenty eight and a half place the tab at twenty eight and a half and measure back five and a quarter the answer is right there twenty three and a quarter here's another arithmetic that's more useful for i think break time than the actual job place the tab on the mark that corresponds to the current year this is 2022 so i put the tab on 22. now ask someone their age and the tape will tell you the year that they were born in since this trick is mostly exciting to a six-year-old let's go to number six and the tape tells us he was born in 2016. now if you do want to try this with someone older consider the zero point to be 1900 instead of 2 000 so the 90s would be the 1990s which is when i was the coolest and 2022 would fall at 122 inches i'm 44 years old i know i don't look a day over 43 but according to the tape i was born in 1978 which i was it works the other way too if i know you were born in 1985 because you like hair bands and astrid washed jeans the tape would tell me you are 37 years old and you should stop wearing the acid wash jeans a measuring tape may also be used as a square if you have a four-sided object such as a box or a frame you can measure from corner to corner in one direction and see if that matches the distance between corners in the other direction if it does it's square if you only have two pieces to square use the three four five rule that's three along one side four along the other and five to connect them along the hypotenuse these are ratios not necessarily fixed numbers so while you can use three inches four inches and then five inches on a small project you could use three feet four feet and five feet on a large project but you could also use something like 6 inches 8 inches and 10 inches anything as long as the ratios are the same many tapes also have special markings on them to help with common construction layout there's usually an arrow every foot to help with those common increments every 16 inches is often in red to help you quickly identify common wall stud spacing and while it's a little less common nowadays some tapes also have diamonds every 19.2 inches which divides an eight foot sheet into five equal parts for some joist and rafter spacing having these markings on the scale can save you a lot of time but even more useful is if you have the ability to make your own marks right on the tape to record various measurements that you're going to repeat throughout a project you can do this with a dry erase marker on any measuring tape but it does tend to wear off easily i've done it with a regular sharpie and then use some wd-40 to clean it off later the tapes i use from fast cap have matte surfaces that are easily marked with just a pencil it takes a little moisture and some scrubbing to wipe the pencil off so the marks will remain for the whole project you can do this on most of their tapes but they also make a special story pole edition which has extra room for marks and notations i love these and they're relatively inexpensive enough that you could just dedicate one tape to a project that you plan to build frequently such as if you make a lot of adirondack chairs this is your adirondack chair tape another way to keep track of measurements is to mark them on the side of the tape's case my tapes have pencil friendly surfaces that make that easy but lacking that you could just pop on a post-it note i kind of like that idea because the note can then be transferred to another tool like the table saw if you don't need the tape there sometimes it pays to have more than one type of tape for the job that story pull tape for example or the flat back or maybe even a left hand right hand tape so the numbers are upright no matter which direction you measure in i definitely recommend that you have one with both imperial and metric measurements ever buy a set of project plans in which they were converted to the system your country uses get requests like that all the time on our website if you have a tape with both scales you have the conversions right there for you if you don't have a double scale tape you'll just ha
