Lew---Triangular scales were also available in cheap, white plastic. I know, because as a starving drafting apprentice in 1965, making $53 for a fourty hour week, that was all I could afford. I couldn't afford one of the "nice" triangular scales untill I'd been working 5 years. ;D ;D We worked on a lot of large gold mining projects, self unloading ships (grain carriers on the Great Lakes) and on the Athabaska tar sands project. Most of our General Arrangements were done at 1/4"=12", detail work was done at 1"=12" scale, and "blow ups" were done at 1.5" and 3" to the foot scale. We HAD to draw everything to scale, but we had to calculate every dimension. This was in the pre calculator days, when everything was done with "Smoleys Four Combined Tables of Logarithmic Functions". The "Checker" (Most hated man in the drafting office) would check your drawing for scale, and your calculations with a slide rule, and if things were out of scale, you would be looking at a complete redraw. Too many "redraws", and you were taken aside by the chief engineer for a "Little Talk" and it would be suggested that perhaps your talents lay in a field other than mechanical drafting.---And God help the machinist/fabricator who was caught scaling anything off a drawing. His career change would be immediate and irrevocable. Now in the wonderfull world of computers, when one of the printing options is "Scale to fit paper size when printing" it would be an even worse option to consider scaling a drawing.----Brian