Science/Engineering/Technical forums

I don't know if I could have survived my early EE life without this guy. Originally WWII vintage, it calculates reactance and resonance via a slide rule. Luckily, I scanned an only slightly damaged version awhile back, so you can make your own by printing these images out, and using a little cardboard to make the slide, spaces etc. It's not rocket science, but it saved me tons of hours to get close on things, and get a feel for scale.

Sadly, the .gifs I scanned are too large to just include here, so I put them at this link: http://www.coultersmithing.com/data/sliderule.zip

Just unzip these, print them (color is nice) and make your slide rule. It's worth it. Yes, the accuracy with this is in the ~2% range - which is about as good as the components you could buy then were...for a lot of things, it's plenty good enough.

That is a twin to the one I have in my desk drawer. It and around 19 other sliding nomagraphs have been my constant companions throughout my career.

mike

Good news! I'm glad not to be the only one. If you've got other useful things - please scan them, convert to .gif (which at least here, tends to print actual size) and post! If you can't make the files fit, email them to me and I'll put them up in the FTP section for you.

Still use a slide rule occasionally as I was brought up on one (when you had to think, before the days of calculators)