Keson Case Study:
Customer Profile:
Based on 250 acres in the Bronx,
The man who has managed these grounds for nearly a decade,
Wayne Cahilly, serves a demanding audience that come
to his workplace seeking beauty, creativity, education, and sometimes even
peace of mind. Combine these customer requirements with the challenge of
maintaining thousands of plants and trees that are not native to the Bronx and
you can understand why Cahilly is equally demanding
about the results he gets from his team and from his tools.
Cahilly does much of his own layout work
on the grounds, and even for his work away from the Botanical Garden as a
forensic arborist, and he prefers a hands-on approach when teaching students in
his site engineering class. As such, he prefers to use tools with a track
record of reliability. For the past 26 years, he has turned to Keson’s metric and Engineering
long tapes to help him perform his job.
Amidst the Beauty,
Rugged Reliability
As site historian and manager of institutional mapping for
the
“A lot of what I do involves electronic measuring instruments
like GPS and Total Stations,” said Cahilly. “But a
lot of the time, I get the accuracy I need just using 200-foot tape measures
and trigonometry.”
“I do an awful lot of layout work for construction people,
whether it is infrastructure or plant material, where I'm using baseline and
offset. Particularly for preliminary layout work, like for water valves and man
hole covers, I’ve found that I'm well within the
limits of accuracy using the tapes. But
I’ve also found that the engineering tapes ensure a greater level of accuracy.”
Cahilly said every construction project
at the
“Keson's surveyor tape measure
has a good level of quality control, with survey-grade tapes, a ring on end
with a pin for use with a plumb bob, and within 100 feet, it is more accurate
than a Total Station,” Cahilly
said.
And even if residents of the
“My students learn how to use tapes and trigonometry to
locate and lay out items, as well as to create a grid over a piece of the
landscape using tapes, then use a level to collect topographic information,” he
said. “Our landscape design program is huge, and is responsible for a large
percentage of people doing landscape design in the
Cahilly said he teaches his students,
many of whom want to immediately employ an electronic tool to take measurements, that a well-used tape inside 100 feet produces
better results than you can get from a Total Station.
“Many of my students are deathly afraid of trigonometry,
but when I teach them how easy it can be using these tapes and how to establish
angles, it gives them confidence. The tape measure itself is not an
intimidating device.”
In his work as a forensic arborist, he said he must
identify the conditions of trees. This work requires precise and reliable data
collection.
“A lot of times I have to do a quick layout for a client
and take a series of quick baseline measurements off a house. And I'll stretch
a 300' tape down the sidewalk to do this. I do a lot of basic, fast mapping
with tapes. At this point, just about my whole collection of
tapes have come out of Keson.”
Cahilly started his career as a field
research assistant at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in
“I had to lay out a series of research plots in a forest,
and the primary investigator on the project, who was my boss, dropped off about
10 metric tapes from Keson,” Cahilly said. “I'm
actually still using some of those same tapes today.”
“One of the advantages Keson has over other manufacturers
is their reels have a long history of being reliable, they don't break in the
field. If you are doing forest research, and you are dragging these reels
through the mud and brush, you want a tape that is going to hold together, you
want to be able to put some tension on it, and you don't want the ring to pop
off the end. And you also want something that is easy to clean,
you want them to be able to get muddy. When they do, I can just reel them out,
stick them in a tub and swish them around, then roll them back up and go.”
“You don't end up with reels that rust or fade over time, you can put a load on the reel. And that's not always
the case with the stuff you find in the hardware store. Another reason I use
them, they don't bust the budget. Keson’s 200-foot
and 300-foot nylon-clad steel tapes give you the ability to put the same
tension on it that you would with a high-end surveyor’s tape.”
Benefits:
Rugged equipment proven to take a beating in harsh
conditions
Easy to read tapes
Molded handle is easy to grasp, even with wet hands
Crank handle is reinforced with metal to provide years of
reliable use
Double-throat roller guides prevent tape twisting
Shovel handle is ideal for rapid reeling.