Standards

What the markings actually record

Almost everything on this shelf carries a figure, and almost every figure gets read as a promise. None of them is. A scale records a ratio to an original, not a finished length; a parts count records what the maker chose to count, and two hundred of them may be identical links; an age mark records a toy-safety decision about small parts, and gets read as a skill grade; a nozzle diameter records a real dimension, and the use attached to it is published by nobody. Each is exact, each is real, and not one of them says what will happen on your own bench. Three groups here hold genuine published documents — toy safety, hazard labeling and the color referentials — and everything else this trade calls a standard is a convention with no publisher at all, which is the single most important thing to know about this collection. Each page says which it is, in four parts: what the document or the convention fixes, what it does not promise, what it works alongside, and which families on this site depend on it.