When should you consider replacing your rulers? Well, it depends heavily on the amount of use, or abuse, your favorite rulers receive. Everytime you make a cut by running a sharp rotorary blabe down the length of the ruler, an almost imperceptable amount of material is shave off the edge. If that ruler has been in service for some time now, enough material may have been removed from the cutting side of the ruler that it is no longer providing an accurate cut.
If you have thought you were at fault for those blocks that came out just a little bit less than square, take heart … it could be a slightly out of square ruler in your tool kit. So, the next time your favorite ruler is pulled out and put to use, check it to ensure that the cutting edge is true. Simply place the cutting edge of the ruler length wise on a flat surface to examine that edge for any gap or deviation.
Once a ruler has lost it’s edge, here are a couple of tips when replacing that ruler.
- Select a ruler with thin dashed lines. Lines with small breaks in them allow the fabric edge to be more precisely postioned. The same logic applies to thinker lines.
- Determine what size you employ most often, you can always cut smaller strips with a longer ruler. However, accurately cutting past the end of a short ruler introduces one more place that a cut can go awry.
Before your next project, take a minute for a quick check of your tools. It could save you a bit of frustration in the end.