Scissor Protractor

[SgtTowser]

The scissors could make a useful protractor, if marked for degrees open along one of the surfaces of the scissors.

Have Vic or Wenger ever offered this on a model?

Does any one have a suggestion for a technique for labeling  or etching hash marks for 90, 45, 15, or better yet every 5 degrees from 90 to 5?

Thx in advance. A forum search for scissor protractor did not yield anything.

[ElevenBlade]

Great idea!  I don't think I've ever seen it done in a mod.

In all honesty I'd thought of this with the pliers on a MT years ago when I was using a Gerber MP600 for work.  I was also using the pliers as a divider for smaller lengths.  One reason I keep passing up the Swisstool Spirit is that there's no ruler on it (afaik).   

Adding some sort of estimate on angle measurements to the scissors would do the same in a more compact package.  It may also be easier to match the pivot on the scissors with the vertex of the angle.   

[SgtTowser]

Yes, the scissor would not be a perfectly Linear protractor from 0 to 90, but it could be Hash-marked in 5-10 decree increments down to about 20 degrees without even using the pivot point of the blade as the angular apex. One could just use the angle created at blades’ edges. The markings might be annodized, laser etched, ground in on the top edge of the blade arm that is attached to the Knife pin.

There are a variety of angles made by all the individual tools that might let one indicate  both geometry and trigonometric approximations, if one were to find oneself without a calculator, protractor, compass, etc. They would be approximation tools, unless the knife were fundamentally redesigned around being an analogue calculator.

I have always been kind of surprised I have never run one of these multitool knives from 1900-1970, or so, that had a slide rule, but I never had to learn to operate a slide rule, so I don’t know the spatial limitations.

I got intrigued by the trigonometric calculation potential of a Swiss Army Knife recently, when I read up on “analogue computers” preceding digital computing.  I’m a gen 1.0 digital type. These late stage analog computer types were amazing!!!

If anyone is curious about how human engineers over the millennia have sometimes been impressively accurate and reproducibly precise looooong before digital computing, it wasn’t all just tables and long division. A slide rule is an analog computer based on a lot of tables. But there Were many more Analog computers developed and used than most younger persons probably suspect. Powerful, too. Just read the Wikipedia entry for analogue computers. It  blew me away, and it would be the tip of the analog computing ice berg.

There are even certain inherent advantages to analog computer design that modern computer researchers/designers are exploring to create future hybrids.

But all I’m asking for here is a few rudimentary hash marks for 90, 45, and 15, not the B-29’s Norden bomb sight, or its analogue computer for coordinating AA fire of four gun turrets by one gunner!