This is an inexpensive, but handy piece of equipment. It's a piece of ordinary 1/4 " graph paper covered with clear box wrapping tape. It's a good tool to mark your strips for splitting (assuming you want 1/4 inch strips. I usually just eye ball the section and whack it, but there are times when I feel more professional, and want to put little tic marks on the section before I whack it. I don't know if would help much if your splitting strips from the whole culm, but since I am just splitting the internodal section, sometimes it helps.