I made myself a snow measuring stick! Actually, two of them.
The base is just a board, about 11" square, and there's a 19" 2x2 for the pole. They're attached with a 2 1/2" weatherproof screw. Pre-drilling is probably a good idea to make sure the post stays plumb and you don't split the 2x2.
The ruler part is measured in 0.1" increments, which is a little unusual, but that's how the National Weather Service likes people to measure snow. I couldn't just pick up a yardstick at the hardware store with 0.1" markings, plus I wanted big numbers so I could read them from inside.
If you want to make your own, here's a snow ruler PDF file.
I just cut out the rulers and laminated them. They're currently stuck on their using foil tape because I didn't have enough time for glue to set before it was supposed to snow. The gaps in the ruler are there so the laminating film completely surrounds the paper so the paper doesn't wick up moisture.
There really is some tech involved here!
I found some nice printable rulers online, but none meeting my criteria. I suppose I could have drawn one in Adobe Illustrator or Visio, but that seemed a little tedious.
I made a simple HTML/Javascript/CSS page using jQuery SVG. This turns out to be a great way of drawing things to perfect scale under programmatic control. I'm not releasing all of the source because it relies on a Tomcat server component to download the SVG file, but here's the Javascript code. This is it!
This was a quick one-off. I normally wouldn't have so many hardcoded constants and leave the console.log statements in the code :-) I just imported the SVG into Adobe Illustrator and exported as PDF.
