Tag: pipe

How Would You Survive Without Your Pipe Diameter Tape Measure?

A New Use for a Pipe Diameter Tape Measure
A New Use for a Pipe Diameter Tape Measure

Your pipe diameter tape measure is probably the most valuable and simplest tool in your toolbox. It will tell you the outside diameter of a pipeline (or your arm) when you wrap it around the circumference. What if you lost your pipe tape? How would you measure the diameter of a pipe or any round object?

  • Use a regular tape measure, if it is flexible enough to wrap around the pipe. A carpenter’s tape is made to stay stiff, so it won’t work in this case. Since the end hook won’t let you lay the zero mark against the pipe, you would have to start at the 1 or 2 inch mark. Read the circumference and divide by 3.14159. That’s a lot of trouble.
  • Use an expensive caliper, transfer the reading to a measuring tape, perhaps, then divide by pi. That’s a clumsy way of doing it.
  • Get a real expensive micrometer. Since they have a narrow range of measuring (1 inch), it would have to be a certain size to begin with. Then measure the diameter directly. Reading the markings on a micrometer is not the easiest thing to do. You have to read the shaft measurement, then add the tumbler measurement to it.

So, hang on to your pipe diameter tape measure and it will save you a lot of trouble.

6 Weird Uses For Tally Books

Tally books were originally made for gas and oil field employees. They use them

Tallybook Uses
Tallybook Uses

to keep track of how many pipes they put down the well when they are drilling. It’s important to know how deep they are at any time. The drillers can enter the time, day, size of pipe and length of pipe, plus anything unusual that happens at each depth.

Since tally books are water resistant, and have lined pages, and fit in your pocket, they have been used for other purposes. Here are some unusual ones:

  1. In a running race, you can enter the ID number and finish time of each runner.
  2. In a sailboat race, you can keep track of the times that each boat passes each buoy, and the finish line.
  3. If you are hired to read water meters in a small town, you can use tally books to write down the meter readings.
  4. Keep track of your medicine times.
  5. Keep a record of your gasoline purchases, and the number of miles you drove since the last fill-up.
  6. Use it as a field book to record what birds you have seen at what times and locations.

Can you think of any other uses?

What Will Pipe Diameter Tape Measures look like in 2030?

Measuring Techniques
Measuring Techniques

There are distance measuring apps out there, but measuring the diameter of a pipe presents a unique measuring situation.

  • Calibration. There will need to be some way of checking to see if the app is working correctly. You will need to measure a known standard to see if the app is measuring right. If not, there needs to be some way of calibrating or adjusting the reading, to make it accurate. In other words, if you measure a 2 inch pipe, and the app says 2.1 inches, you need a way to adjust the setting to read 2.0 inches. Otherwise, when you measure a 3 inch pipe or any size pipe, the measurement would be off.
  • Calibration should be done with different sizes of pipe, to make sure you will get an accurate reading at any of those sizes.
  • The curvature of the pipe needs to be considered. You aren’t taking a picture of a 2D object. The pipe is 3D, so your camera may not see the top and bottom of the pipe as being 180 degrees away from each other. If you are too close to the pipe, you wouldn’t see the full 180 degrees. So your measurement would be too small.
  • Resolution of measuring. A pipe diameter tape measure normally has a resolution of 100th of an inch diameter. Can a smart phone app be that accurate?
  • The nearness of the object. For calibration, we would need some standard distance from the cell phone. Maybe this could be accomplished by using an object like a 12″ ruler, placed between the pipe and the phone. Hopefully, a less mechanical method will pop up.

If you know of an app that can accurately measure pipe diameter, please let me know. If one does not exist, I’m sure it will be invented in the near future.

The Mystery of Pipe Diameter Tape Measure Codes

Mystery of Diameter Tape Codes
Mystery of Diameter Tape Codes

Lufkin pipe diameter tape measure products are available with different scales. To find the right tape for your needs, here is how to read the codes that are embedded in the SKU numbers.

  • “P” means that it is a “pi” tape, also known as a diameter tape.

Examples are w606p, w906pd, w606pm, asw616pd, w606pd, w906p.

  • “D” means that it measures in tenths of an inch. If the “D” were missing, it would measure in 64ths of an inch.

Examples are w906pd, asw616pd, w606pd.

  • “M” means that it measures in metric scale.

An example is w606pm.

Celebrate Pi Day 2019 With A Diameter Tape Measure

pi symbol
pi symbol

Pi Day is March 14. This year you can help celebrate by answering the question at the bottom.

Pi is the constant ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, no matter what size the circle is. This is useful knowledge when you work with water pipes or oil or gas pipelines, and you need to replace part of it. You can measure the circumference and divide by pi. But there’s an easier way to do that.

Diameter Tape (pi Tape)
Diameter Tape (pi Tape)

Let a Lufkin Diameter tape measure do it for you. You just wrap it around the pipe, and read the diameter. Mathematicians call pi an irrational number, since it goes on for an infinite number of decimal places, but using a diameter tape is a very rational and easy way to find the diameter of a pipe. To see a little video on How to measure the diameter of a pipe, just click here.

 

Trivia: What famous scientist was born on Pi Day?

 

 

 

3 Easy Steps to Use a Pipe Diameter Tape Measure

How To Use A Diameter Tape
How To Use A Diameter Tape

This time, we won’t get into the geometry theory of pi that we had in high school. The magic of a pipe diameter tape measure is its simplicity of use. Here are the 3 steps to find the diameter of a pipeline:

  1. Clean the pipe surface. Soil and any other contamination, of course, will make the pipe seem bigger than it really is.
  2. Wrap the diameter tape around it, with the diameter scale visible to you.
  3. Simply read off the tape. This will be the diameter, even though the tape is wrapped around the circumference. That’s all!

Some things to watch for…..Some OD tapes (diameter tapes) are marked in 100ths of an inch. Some are marked in 64ths of an inch. On the 64ths of an inch tape, 32/64 would be 1/2″. 16/64 would be 1/4″. 24/64 would be 3/8″. For convenience, you can use a magic marker to mark some of these common, but confusing measurements.

For a 2 1/2 minute video with more detail, click How To Use A Diameter Tape.

 

Give A Diameter Tape Measure For Christmas

Give Diameter Tapes for Christmas
Give Diameter Tapes for Christmas

A diameter tape measure can save you a lot of time and frustration when you want to find the OD (outside diameter) of a pipe, post, or tree. This special tape has the inch scale (or metric scale) stretched out by a factor of pi (3.14159). So, if you wrap it around the pipeline, you will not see the “circumference”. You will see its diameter. You don’t need to divide your answer by 3.14159.