I cant keep numbers strait in my head but fortunately i am very good at eyeballing things (drives my father crazy) i think he sleeps with a square and a 300ft tape anyway for years i have played a very simple game on line called you guessed it The Eyeballing Game http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/

the nice thing is it breaks down how you do accuracy wise for parallelograms/midpoint/bisect angle/triangle center/circle center/right angle and convergence dont get me wrong this is not a edge of your seat type of game but it lets me know what i am good at eyeballing and what i really should break out the tools to find the center of its kind of fun and a good time killer plus since we work with hot metal a lot of the time its a handy little tool to get in some practice on without worrying about burnt fingers long story short i finally got around to firing off a letter of thanks for the entertainment to Matthias over at Woodgears and in passing asked if it was ok to toss up a link here for some non woodworkers to come in and play

he was quite happy to let us in

i hope you guys get some enjoyment out of this

Big Red, That's pretty neat. I tried it and didn't do too bad. (4.7) I think that with practice, a guy could get better at it. Thanks for posting. :)

great game I was just a little off but the green marker were just a shadow ti what I did fun

Have seen that before, maybe here, but it's been a couple years. Thanks for re-posting it.

Getting close is what it is all about. If you can not guess at the answer and get close, how do you know if your even in the ball park when you use a calculator?

For instance what is 100 divided by 5. Well 100 divided by 4 is 25 so it is less than 25. If you said 43 you are "not close" as we have already determined the answer is less than 25. If you said 22 then your close. The actual number is ______?

If you need accurate, calculate the problem to 6 decimals, which is more accurate than you can measure with a yard stick and a piece of soapstone.

0.00001 miles is a little over 1/2 inch (.6336 inches according to Google), so choosing your units does matter some

That estimating game is fun.

Phil

good stuff
and yes i do still measure for many things but if i am just trying something out or say i am working with hot metal and dont have any soapstone handy to mark it with its always nice to know i can get close
finding the center of triangles and making the parallelograms i am bad at
all the others are a cinch
though i still flinch a bit when punching out a hole

5.67. Not bad, but expected to do better. I used to have to freehand/eyeball stuff all the time in the ski shop. Discovered I'm pretty bad at judging right angles.

Private E., precision and accuracy are for machinists. 'Close' is for blacksmiths. ;-)

Well played, sir. Well played.

Then I must have a pretty good eye for 'close enough.' :?)

0.00001 miles is a little over 1/2 inch (.6336 inches according to Google), so choosing your units does matter some

You dropped a zero.

There are 63,360 inches in a mile x 6 decimals or 0..00 00 01 is 0.06336 or just a bit over 1/2 inches. Close enough for me. (grin).

You dropped a zero.

There are 63,360 inches in a mile x 6 decimals or 0..00 00 01 is 0.06336 or just a bit over 1/2 inches. Close enough for me. (grin).

But nearer 5/8"

When visually inspecting an object for a defect such as a crack, the distance (d) might be around 12 inches. This would be a comfortable viewing distance. At 12 inches, the normal visual acuity of the human eye is 0.00349 inch. What this means is that if you had alternating black and white lines that were all 0.00349 inch wide, it would appear to most people as a mass of solid gray. Reference

I refer back to the original post. Eye balling it is sometimes close enough !!
Ahh the bits of trivia you pick up from just reading the forum.

My machine shop teacher worked on the Mercury project for NASA....I remember him saying that if they gave him 1/2 a thousandth (or .0005), he felt like that was a mile........

He told me once I should be a blacksmith (didn't like the way I was milling something)....so I told him I was trying to be one.....made us both laugh.

That was cool!!

I shoot a LOT of pool. Or actually used to. Blacksmtihing is more my passion these days. But there are many similarities. Pool is very visual and also requires the physical aspect. Bigred, do you shoot pool?

IF you are good with seeing the angles and such then pool could be a sport you may enjoy. But seeing the angle is one thing. Now you have to also physically make the shot.

I would be curious if Brian Brazeal would comment on this. When he was here for two days he taught me during the day and I tried to to teach pool in the evening. He seemed to like pool and was a good "student". I attempted to make numerous comparisons to blacksmithing and pool. Some may have actually made sense. BUt it all comes down to eye hand coordination and being able to visualize the outcome then physically execute the Shot or the Hammer blows with precision AND having an accurate plan that actually works. Man I could go on with many analogies but won't.... :)

4.16 in one try for me. That is a cool game. I'm going to show it to the all the carpenters I'm currently working with, those guys have good eyes.

I scored 5.96 on that exercise. made a mistake with the mouse with one. Borntoolate made a comment about Brian on this thread. When I first read the title I thought of Brian because he is the best I have ever seen at judging distances by eye. Whether it is 5/16" or 10 feet. It is contageous as well. Once you learn he distances on your anvil the shorter lengths become more recognizable. I dont know how you develop the more longer ones to such accuracy though. I did learn not to argue with him about eyeballing a length though.

Fun game! It reminds me of a time a few years ago, when a friend of mine was over for dinner with my family and he thought we were crazy because we interrupted dinner for 20 minutes arguing vehemently over whether or not a stand alone unit in the kitchen was level or not. These things happen in a room full of engineers and carpenters.

sure glad they make hand grenades......

Retook the test on a different computer with better monitor settings - 3.77. Much more gooder.

Apparently, if your monitor is not set correctly, it will distort things in the test, especially the right angles.

Ok, here is another interesting game, if you work with a ruler very much.
http://www.rsinnovative.com/rulergame/

My wife just scored a 3.8 on the eyeball game, her first time....I'm not telling my score

The English ruler or Imperial ruler is the monarch of the time, currently the Queen, we use a rule to measure with

5am and I been drinking... not sure that sober would be much better

Well this was fun.ha ha .. 5.35 130 s

I need to practice some more