Lasercut Measuring Tool

I've been working in various shops for years and I often run across unlabeled shelves of material that have different thicknesses. What's a shop rat to do?

This simple measuring tool fits in your pocket or a tool drawer and circumvents using the measuring tape, which is less accurate and more work for quickly determining the depth of a piece of wood in the scrap bin.

If you have another vector-editing program other than Illustrator, you can replicate these steps in your program of choice.

Use the Rounded Rectangle tool, make a 3" x 2" rectangle. Set the stroke width to .001 for laser-cutting (or whatever your laser-cutter requires for vectors). A 3-inch by 2-inch piece piece of acrylic comfortably fits in your pocket.

The material I use typically comes in 1/8", 3/6", 1/4", 5/16" and 3/8". You can set up your own sizes — smaller, larger or go metric.

Create rectangles that are 1.25" wide and for the height, the thickness of each sheet that you want to measure.

Position the slots with an equal amount of space between each one. 1/4" is about right.

Use the Pathfinder tool to subtract the area of the rectangles from the rounded rect shape.

Add your number values to the left of it's matching slot.

Just in case you're not familiar with laser-cutting, you will have to use Create Outlines to convert text for raster-etching.

Laser cut this simple shape. I'd recommend using 3/16" acrylic.  It will take only a couple minutes, so be sure to make extras for your friends.

I left the paper on for better text legibility.

I've included the Illustrator file (the text hasn't been converted to outlines just yet).

Enjoy!