Is there a way to scale by an absolute distance, rather than a percentage? Let's say I have a ring of vertices that I'd like to scale down, and I'd like them all to move by a fixed amount, like 1mm (I usually work with metric units). What's the easiest way to achieve this? If I type '1' it just sets the scale to 1 and they don't move.



The only way I've come up with to do this is to extrude a vertex along one of the axes by 1mm, and then snap the scale movement to that vertex.





This is a pain though, and if I don't have a vertex that happens to lie on an axis I can't do the little extrusion trick and it doesn't work at all. I do a lot of modeling for 3d printing, and I end up needing to do this all the time. Hoping there's a better way to do this.
Think I discovered what I was looking for here. Push/Pull from the Mesh->Transform menu seems to work exactly like scaling, except that it moves all the vertices by a specific amount. You can restrict the axes and change the pivot point to the cursor, median point, etc.