Dealing with inconsistencies in plywood

@jonathan.forst and @marmak3261 Am I having Deja vú? Or have we had this conversation before? I honestly don’t think I have ever had this problem before now. But I could be wrong because when I read you two comments, I have either read something very similar or have had a conversation of such with you guys! Either way! You refreshed my memory. Because I forgot that there for a few days at a time— I was holding a flashlight up to my plywood. I will have to remember to do that next time. I know this sounds cheap, but I filled my blow outs with hot glue, turned them from ornaments to tags, painted over the dry glue, and called it a masterpiece!

3 Likes

Wasn’t me. I have only read others’ comments about this. Sometimes it all seems like a blur. I do have to catch myself at times, responding to something and then realize that I already said it somewhere else to the same person.

2 Likes

Sometimes it takes several tries to break through.

1 Like

Hey guys… what would you guys use this for? I know the description is clearly written there. But I am not a math expert. So I am not sure exactly how this would be used. But it looks so cool!

2 Likes

It’s a slide rule. It’s what we used to use for doing complicated calculations before calculators were invented. :blush:

4 Likes

it just looks so cool. But I just can not justify the 10 bucks not knowing how I would use it.

Here’s an even cooler one, for free: Ancillary Mode (an escutcheon)

:blush:

4 Likes

Multiplication and Division for those two scales. Place the Inner ring number “1” under the number on the second ring to be multiplied. In the case shown it’s about 2.7. Find the second number to be multiplied on the inner ring. For example if you wanted to multiply 2.7 x 2, the number on the outer ring above the inner ring’s 2 shows about 5.4, which is the answer. Someone used to using a sliderule (in this case a circular slide rule) could quickly and easily multiply the numbers to an accuracy of 0.05

Can also be used to do divisions by placing the numerator above the divisor and looking on the outer ring above the inner rings “1” to find the answer. It sometimes takes a little practice, usually just common sense, to understand where to place a decimal point.

5 Likes

This is one of the most underappreciated things about sliderules. You had to be able to estimate and understand the likely range of the answers to get the decimal point. I’m appalled by how often I see people with orders of magnitude errors in their answers to things who have no clue the answer just doesn’t make sense. Blank looks when you ask how it’s possible and then you have to explain they’re off by a factor of 10 or 100 and they want to know how you could know that. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

It’s an intellectual and skill loss we’ll not rectify with future generations :pleading_face:

3 Likes

Heh - I didn’t want to comment and resurrect your old thread, but I’ve found that the lights from the :glowforge: itself are plenty to identify voids! I just hold it up over the closed lid and mark issue areas with a sharpie :slight_smile:

4 Likes

ha! hey thanks! With that bright light looking right at me , Not once did I think of that after all of the wood I have been going through and checking since then, marking it ahead of time so that I don’t forget. Thanks!

1 Like

Hey Thanks, @rpegg. You wouldn’t be able to bet your last bottom dollar on it (or not even your 1st dollar of your 599 billion dollars), but I was a math/algebra/geometry/ WIZ I was always at the top of my class. I loved it. When the teacher would begin a new lesson, I would take off. Not even needing instructions on most lessons, and finish everything there was to do. By doing so, I tortured myself, I would get so miserably impatient waiting on the next lesson to start. My teacher hated it. And after all those years, I just knew it would all just come flowing back to me while helping my highschooler. It was actually the opposite. None of it ever returned. Not a drop. I know my simple basics quicker than some. Eehhh, maybe most. But thats it. I have definitely lost every ounce of my math skills. It is definitely not like riding a bike for me. It actually embarrasses me sometimes. Just knowing how it once was. It is sad. Same with Spanish. It took two years. I spoke it fluently. I can understand what most say. But have a hard time speaking. I get my point across.

2 Likes

Not knowing how to use a sliderule just means you are younger than 65. Sliderules only have nostalgia going for them. When I try to calculate Sin(x) or square root of a number I stopped reaching for the sliderule in 1972.

Yeah. “Hey Siri what’s the square root of 612?”

It’s hard to mourn the loss of those skills, like many others, from flint knapping to coding with punch cards. We’ve progressed to a point where we have the luxury to specialize and pursue higher arts like laser cutting.

If we all knew how to use a slide rule we wouldn’t even have this forum, we’d never have built the toolset it took to get here if we didn’t move past that.

2 Likes

Haven’t moved to Siri or Alexa yet. Don’t like talking to people or even the wife’s dog. And Siri can be a smartass.

1 Like

Yeah ask her if she can beatbox, it’s pretty funny.

But seriously it’s useful when your hands are full.

I ask Siri to covert measurements or do other math when I’m in the middle of something.

It’s also nice to ask like “what’s the high temperature today” when you’re getting dressed, etc.

Definitely not a necessity but it does have its uses.

4 Likes

Oh I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t have moved on. I was a very early calculator user (& got grief for not being fair to the other kids). But I’m always interested in the secondary & tertiary effects of change. In this case there’s a demonstrable reduction in the ability of people to estimate answers to math problems.

It’s similar to automatic cash registers - no sense of what the total ought to be or why it might be wrong. I see it every day. My local convenience store had fountain sodas any size for 99 cents except for the largest size is 49 cents extra. No one was concerned that it rang up as $1.69 every time. Explain it and there’s a blank look. They finally changed the sign (no one could figure out how to reprogram the register or they decided most people were okay paying the extra that there was no point I guess).

GPS units are starting to do the same thing with people’s ability to find their way someplace without one. Directional sense and the ability to create mental maps of their position relative to other things is declining.

Would I advocate for no calculators, computers, cash registers or GPS units? Nope, but I’m not surprised when I notice people are becoming less mentally adept :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes

There are a lot of areas where the "new’ thing is of lower quality result, but the one that drove me most was that a hand file could clean up jewelry faster and better than a rubber wheel on a power tool as the rubber wheel was a circle working on a circle that they would only touch at the point of contact and slight differences in work effect would leave bouncy gouges rather than a smooth curve. A minor point I guess as most folk would not notice where the file would foster a curve by its natural action. The prime pont however was that the time and effort was actually the same and the file had much better control but the difference in moving your hand versus moving it less while the tool always threatened damage was a difference few others thought about.

The laser does provide precision you cannot achieve with a hand saw, just as the computer working at 10 decimal points works better than a slide rule where you struggle for two but by letting the machine do the job, both natural mistakes like the 21 cent over charge or the burning Glowforge are unintended risks and worse bad actors can do serious damage and nobody would notice,

1 Like

@evansd2… somehow I ended up clicking on something and the pencil was not there. Then… BAM! There it was!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 32 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.