Ok, I have to say it. This is woodworking ! You're not building a diesel engine here. If you can achieve accuracy to 1/16", a little sanding on the finished project will render excellent results. If you can efficiently achieve 1/32 accuracy you are doing very well indeed. The place you need accuracy is not in rough cuts on the saw but in the final fits between pieces and this comes from careful "fitting" piece to piece not from measurements. On a finished piece no one will ever notice, nor does it matter, that the table, drawer, or jewelry box is .001 or even 1/16th longer, wider, or thicker than some presumed "perfect size" as long as the fits are tight. I just don't understand all this obcession with dimensional accuracy where wood is involved. Maybe it comes from a need to follow plans accurately, I don't know. If that is the case, stop using plans and work from your imagination.
Sorry, my rant is now over.
Paul M
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Perhaps we're looking at this similarly but drawing different conclusions. For me, calipers, either vernier, digital, or dial, as well as dial indicators, etc., are tools like any other in the wood shop. They come out when needed and not to satisfy some obsession with dimensional accuracy, but rather to easily achieve the accuracy that certain tasks require.
You're right about who cares that a jewelry box is longer or wider than some perfect size, but that's not what I'd use a caliper for. I've made many boxes where the size with based on what I was using for the lid. I use calipers when some critical measurement is necessary, like the thickness of a tenon in a mortise and tenon joint, or the spacing of dowels, etc.
Currently, inspired by your mobile cart for Special Purpose Tools (SPTs), I'm building one of my own to house a jointer, bandsaw, belt sander, and strip sander, together with some other Shopsmith-related bits and pieces. I used a vernier caliper to verify the spread of mounting tubes at 7 inches and their diameter (about 1 1/4"), and used a compass to lay out the spacing for drilling those 1 1/4" holes in the blocks that will receive and hold the SPTs. It's so simple, measure the outside spacing of the two tubes, subtract the diameter of one of the tubes and you have the center-to-center spacing (about 8 1/4" - 1 1/4" = 7"). And there's no guessing.
In making the drawers boxes, I'm using a dado in the drawer sides and rabbet in the front and back, adding a separate front later. The dados, which were cut first, were made with two passes of the saw blade to something in the neighborhood of 1/4" wide by 5/16" deep. No real accuracy in measurements here is required. The rabbet, also cut on the table saw, then requires the precision necessary to create a tight joint and here is where a caliper comes in handy to adjust the saw fence and blade height. Make the test cuts, measure with the calipers, adjust the fence and blade with a dial indicator and your done -- usually a perfect fit. There are other ways to do this for sure, but I'm comfortable going this way.
In making the carcass for the drawers, the saw fence accurately sizes the various parts. Alternatively, I use a miter gauge, with fence and stop blocks, to cut identically sized parts. There's no need to sand anything to size.
Today, at Harbor Freight, you can buy a 6 inch stainless steel digital caliper for 9.99, a dial indicator for 11.99 and a magnetic base for another 9.99, and simplify a lot of set-ups or measurements, in my view. You can achieve the same without these items, but some will find them useful, and not necessarily because of some obsession with accuracy.
