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How to read a tape measure

Published by Rob Thomas | March 30th 2009 | Views:

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Tape measures are used when building stuff. It is important to make precise measurements in order to build precisely. First time when trying to read the tape measure it all seems nonsense. But once you get used to the notations and meanings it will be a piece of cake.

First let's understand the units of measurement. The basic unit is a foot. A foot has 12 inches. One inch is further subdivided in 16 parts. The notation for the inch is ''. The notation for the foot is '. This way when you see 3' 9-3/16'' this will be read as “three feet, 9 and three sixteenths inches”.

It is easy to read the feet and inches on the measuring tape. The hard part is to read the subdivisions of the inches. As we mentioned previously there are 16 divisions in an inch. Each line representing a division has a different length to recognize it easier.

The longest line is the inch line. The second longest is the half inch line. The third longest is the quarter inch line. The fourth longest line is the eighth inch line. And the shortest line is the smallest subdivision – the 1/16 inch line.

Once you know what each line means and which are the divisions you can mode forward. It's important to be able to distinguish the 1/16'' line from the 1/8'' one. Once you are able to do this let's say you need to measure 3/16'' as in the example. All you will have to do is look for the third line among the subdivisions. If you were to measure 5/8'' you just had to count 5 1/8'' lines.
There is nothing else to know about how to read a tape measure. If you learn the notations and divisions above you should have no difficulty.
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