 Hi there! In today's video I'm going to tell you all about calipers, how to use them and when to use them. So these are calipers. It's a great tool to have for any jewelry maker because you can get quite precise measurements and it will help you to determine sizes of various things in your jewelry making. The way these work is they just slide back and forth and you put whatever it is that you're going to measure in between the jaws and hold it in there in place and then you can measure. Now this scale has millimeters and it also has inches. For jewelry makers I really highly recommend just using a millimeter scale it's so much easier than dealing with fractions of inches and most of your beads come measured in millimeters. So the way you read it you look at this line right here not the edge. Don't look at where it lines up with the edge but look at where this line lines up. So right here it's at seven millimeters or go up here and again it's this line that's scribed on and not the edge. It's a five sixteenths of an inch and when you measure beads they are usually given in their measurement from hole to hole. So whether you have this little seven millimeter bead or this big almost 22 millimeter lentil they're measured from hole to hole and you might have oval shaped or oddly shaped beads that will have more than one dimension. But the first one is usually from hole to hole. Another great thing that you can use calipers to measure is your wire. Let's say here's a piece of wire that was I don't have a measurement on. It was separated from the spool. I can use the calipers to measure this and when you're measuring leave the object in the calipers while you're determining the measurement because it can slide out of position on you. Now I've zoomed in a little bit more here so I can show you just how to measure this because you can get as precise with this particular calipers and it's not a very expensive one you can get precise as tenths of millimeters. So we take a look here and we see that this line falls in between one and two millimeters. But if we see these ten marks here and you just keep looking until you find the mark that lines up exactly with one above it and that looks to be here just about six. I guess it's ten so that long one's five so just about six. So we know that this wire is 1.6 millimeters and you can find charts like this one that show us the size of wire engaged so we can look down here 1.63 millimeters and know that our wire is 14 gauge. So it's a very handy thing to do when you're making jewelry to know just what size you have. Of course you can use your calipers to measure tools if you have a random drill bit hanging around and you don't know how big it is. Use your calipers to measure that. You can measure according such as this is a piece of Kumihimo braid and say you wanted to pick a end cap that would fit it. You can use calipers to measure things like that. So this is a very handy tool to have and once you know how to use it it's quite easy.