A W Faber / Faber-Castell Slide Rules

My second slide rule was an A W Faber-Castell 1/92 Log Log (195?). I was immediately impressed with its quality of craftsmanship and 'feel'. In need of a direction in this new interest, I found out a little more about Faber-Castell's slide rules and their history, and decided to focus on them as a manufacturer. Other fairly significant reasons for concentrating on Fabers were the relative wealth of information on them, particularly in regard to dating them, and their prevalence and hence affordability.

Faber-Castell (as AW Faber) made slide rules from around the start of the slide rule mass production era, and their rules are generally regarded as amoungst the highest quality. As I am interested in 'old things' and their developement, I narrowed my focus on Fabers to from their earliest models in the 1890's, through their model range explosion, up to when they first changed their model numbering system around 1935 - their formative years. After this came the Second World War and a rationalisation their range.

I have most of the more common models from my period of interest, but actually less than half of the variants made. My earliest rules are unlabelled models 350 and 360 from around 1895-99, followed by several examples of models from the period up to the start of the First World War when there was a lot of experimentaton and advances in construction. I have only a few rules from after the model numbering changed, my largest and most advanced is a 344/83 Novo-Duplex demonstration rule for a 2/83 from 1964, and my youngest is a 1970-75 310/88,89 OHP demonstration rule.

The Model Summary below contains a list of my Faber/Faber-Castell slide rules with summary details. This is followed the rules grouped as Model by Type - Mannheim, Enhanced Mannheim, System Rietz, System Darmstadt, Log Log, Business, Electro, Other Systems and Demonstration - and by scale length within that.

Additional slide rule material can be accessed using the links in the left bar under "Slide Rule Content Pages". List of my Faber/Faber Castell models with defining characteristics. Multiple date entries within a model number indicates multiple versions/examples.