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Extremely good at doing nothing.
In our effort to make the most precise and stable pocket-sized scale figure on Earth, we decided to use Invar.
Invar is a Noble Prize-winning alloy known for having an exceptionally low coefficient of thermal expansion. When exposed to great changes in temperature, the material hardly expands or contracts.
Machined into a cube with tolerances 1/4 the thickness of a sheet of paper, the Invar Cubic Inch is the most dimensionally stable and indisputably precise object we have ever held.
It's our scale figure of choice when we're photographing samples, references, and final products. We made it years ago to satisfy our impractical, but uncontrollable, desire for precision in-studio. Now, we are bringing it back in a limited run for everyone to enjoy.
Invar Cubic Inch for scale.
(Thank you @this_kebun for modeling and printing Hunter's cubic inch holster. This does not come included with the product, but I'm sure Kevin would share the files if you wanted them.)
Transcript
This perfect little cube is machined out of a special alloy that makes it extremely good at doing nothing because doing nothing is exactly what we wanted it to do. So if you look down at my feet, you'll see that something, not nothing, is happening. This gap of the bridge is called expansion joint. This bridge is made of steel and concrete, which are materials that will grow and shrink depending on the temperature. And this gap allows for that movement of those materials to happen without the bridge tearing itself apart or buckling into itself. But there are some instances, in some cases, where you don't want the material to grow or shrink at all. Scale figures are used by scientists and architects and painters to help you understand how large an object is. Because I'm standing on this bridge, you get some relative sense for the scale and overall size of this bridge. Better for smaller objects, like the ones that we design and collect, we need a smaller and more precise scale figure. The most obvious and commonly used item is a coin, but this coin has the exact same problem as better bridge up there bad thermal expansion. If you were to increase the temperature of this quarter by about a 100 degrees, you would actually grow the size of it by about point 2%. That means when I take a photo of an object with a better next to it, and I don't know what the temperature in the room was, how large is that quarter? Yes, we know 100% that we are insane people, but if we were good go through the effort of making our own reference objects, we wanted that object to be as consistent and perfect as it possibly could be. There was only one choice for what material to use, which is the most dimensionally stable alloy known to man, which is inbar, has an extremely low coefficient of thermal expansion. Over the same temperature change, Invar will experience 10 to 15 times less expansion or contraction as copper, for example. It'll be as close to a perfect scale figure as we could ever need or want. In perpetuity, whenever I am documenting image. Rank, yes, we did three d print a holster for it because you never know when you're gonna need to take your perfect scale figure out into the world with you. Good do I have an appreciation and affection for an inch.
