PCI Midwest is focusing on answering your questions. Has it been a while since you learned how to read a tape measure? Forgot what all those lines mean? Well, here’s a quick and easy “how to” refresher that we hope will jog your memory. Tape measures come in both imperial units (inches and feet) and metric (centimeters and meters). Each have unit breakdowns for further accuracy. In this video, we will be showing you how to read a tape measure using inches and feet. The big numbers on the tape are inches. Inches are broken down into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths. The space from the largest mark to the next is one inch. We all know that 1/2 inch is half of one inch. The remaining markings follow a similar pattern. A quarter inch is half of a half inch. An eighth inch is half of a quarter inch. Most tape measures go as small as one sixteenth inch. One sixteenth inch is half of one eighth inch. The one sixteenth inch markings are the shortest lines on the tape followed by the eighths which are just a bit longer. The quarters are just a little longer than that and so on. So if your measurement falls on one of those shortest marks, you’ll know right away that you’re dealing with sixteenths. If your measurement falls on one of the next longest lines, you’ll know that your measurement will be in eighths. And so on to quarters and halves. You don’t have to do the math, you just need to know what the four line lengths mean. Oh, yeah! Don’t forget that one foot equals twelve inches! There should be a foot marking on your tape every twelve inches. Now that we know what the markings mean, how do we measure something? Easy! Put the end of the tape measure at one end of the length you want to measure and keep the tape measure tight. Don’t let it sag. Then take a reading by looking at the markings on the tape measure. To determine the accurate length, read the length in feet and/or inches and then add in any remaining fractions of an inch. For example, to determine the length in the image below, you would add in one inch plus one quarter inch to get one and a quarter inches. As another example, the image below shows a length that goes from the ¾ inch mark to one of the smallest markings, which are sixteenths. To measure the length in this example, you would need to count all the sixteenth markings or larger to get thirteen sixteens of an inch. We hope that this quick refresher helps you when using a tape measure. For more answers to questions, contact PCI Midwest.