My regular job involves verification of highly specified and precision products. As such I am involved in a discipline called Measurement System Analysis, or MSA for short. You might even say I am a Subject Matter Expert. There are others who say this makes me a bit of a, how should I put this, a “smarty-pants” (trying to keep this family friendly here).

Regular readers know that each winter I travel to the far north for an annual ice fishing tournament.

Last year there was a bit of controversy with regard to the determination of winners.

In this particular tourney, prize-winning entries are based upon length. Unfortunately they were measuring the fish using a standard yardstick, great for measuring walls and floors but not so much for three-dimensional objects like fish. Difficult to keep the fish’s nose lined up with the zero mark.

Since the tournament director is a friend, I offered to build a custom measurement board for this year’s tourney. I had built a similar board for my own use in a friendly little bluegill contest I hold annually on my own lake, so I did have some experience creating one. It had a capture angle block to push the fish against, and had an inlaid steel rule that was graduated in 1/16” increments, built of cedar and was nicely appointed with a wood-burned tourney logo.

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