Cool Tools: Story Tape started out as an April Fool’s joke. The folks at Lee Valley Tools assumed people would enjoy reading about the fictional product (a spool of retractable blank measuring tape that you can write notes on with a Sharpie pen), but their R&D team liked the idea so much that they decided to put them into production.
5 comments:
My friend's father is a woodworker who makes furniture and clocks, and does some cabinetry work. He of course uses regular measuring tapes and rulers and such, but he also has a "story stick" of sorts that he uses for things like table leg distances and such. They're such odd distances, but they need a bit of a standard to them. In theatre, the flats commonly built have semi-weird, yet standard spacings on them. A "flat" story tape or a "platform" story tape could be very useful in scene shops, especially for beginners (like us freshmen), who are asked to build flats and platforms, but might not necessarily remember all of the measurements. A story tape would leave the students more autonomous instead of having a supervisor stand about for the main purpose of telling where to put in screws. Instead they could off be doing other work (being more efficient) while the story tape had little arrows pointing to where screws should be put in.
Something like this does have it uses. I question how many uses there really are, though. Once you write on it, you can't reuse the tape for something different. It would be more interesting if the tape could be written upon, have those markings stay until you are done with them, and then be able to wipe them off in order to have a clean, blank tape again. Otherwise you would need to have a series of different story tapes for every different thing that you would need to measure. This sounds much more like a novelty item than something that would actually be useful in a shop.
I love instances like this one where a joke or a chance happening leads to the development of something that turns out to be interesting and valuable. My brother is a big fan of such situations, and has spent a lot of time telling me about how many scientific theories were discovered or inventions invented due to luck and sometimes accidents.
I like Kelly's idea of a story tape for building flats, although I don't know if building flats and platforms is so confusing that you would need a "template" for it. And like Jess, I wonder how useful it would be in a shop where many different projects are being built if you can't change the markings. I do think it's a cool object and like the way it came about, but it might not be worth using.
There seems to be a reoccuring theme to theatre where we steal ideas from other industries or we solve things by trying to figure out the most ridiculous answer to an issue.
Anywho, i dont think this idea of a story tape could be useful for flats or platforms but I do think it would be a great idea for a company that builds touring shows. A story tape thats marked out for a road box or section of a truck. Just how it mentions using it marked out for the trunk of a car.
Ya know, for $6 that's not half bad.... last semester there was an article about the use of story sticks for cabinet making, which prior to that I didn't know was a technique (some carpenter I am huh?), so I can maybe see this as useful. However, i don't think that any serious carpenter or craftsman for that matter will really take it very seriously (the idea is cheap and a little corny, not unlike the way it was initially proposed). And in terms of the using a story stick for making flats and platforms....I guess I might be practical to a point but it's not much for difficult for use to print out drawing, and the flats and platforms aren't always identical so your stick would be rendered useless quickly -- and quite frankly, it's rare these days that we build traditional flats and platforms anymore ("they're not as innovative and sexy apparently").
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