Marking gauges 101 (& beyond) Part 1

**IanW** · 1st October 2018, 10:35 AM

Warning: wordy & picture-heavy!

Someone suggested I do an update on the article I wrote for AWR (#83) on marking gauges. By coincidence, they have just posted it online, if anyone’s interested.

The limitations on the word-count for magazine articles meant I couldn’t go into a lot of detail, so to complement that, here’s a bit more on the subject. Construction details will be light & kept to things that need some explanation because that’s usually obvious from a picture or two. There are usually several alternative ways to make the parts, depending on the gear you have or can access. For example, I have a small metal lathe which I use to make parts but Derek Cohen has devised some clever ways to make parts with minimal gear, such as the brass shoes to prevent the beam being marked by metal thumbscrews.

You don’t have to be a grizzled old Woodie with 50 years of woodworking experience to make yourself a pretty decent & functional marking gauge. I’m pretty sure it was the first woodworking tool I ever made (at the ripe old age of 12 or 13). It was no great work of art, but it scratched lines on my wood more or less consistently & reliably, so by that measure, it was a success.

It definitely doesn’t have to be brassy & precious to do the job; as one of the most basic tools, they existed in some form or other since people started making wooden joints. The most basic is a ‘fixed’ gauge, for repetitive marking of a single width. I’ve seen a few examples that were obviously made to do a single job, which consisted of one piece of wood nailed across another, and a nail driven through the ‘beam’ at the desired point for the marker. Of course a gauge that has a moveable stock which can be securely locked to the beam at any desired point is a far more versatile tool, and a number of ways to achieve that have been devised.
Though not quite the simplest to make, this has to be the simplest adjustable gauge I know of, it consists of just two pieces of wood: MG 1.jpg MG 2.jpg.jpg

The beam has a slightly elliptical cross-section & fits in a matching ellipsoidal hole in the stock (some versions use a spiral cross-section, which is a little more complicated to make). The beam is locked in position by twisting it. To make this example, I drilled a hole in the stock and worked it slightly oval with a coarse round file. The beam was turned to the major diameter of the ellipse, then worked oval with a spokeshave until I got the desired fit. The ellipse doesn’t have to be pronounced, it only needs something less than 2mm difference between major & minor diameters on a 20mm beam. Once you have the beam fitting & locking nicely, you can mark the position for the pin.
Initially, these gauges work well, but they have a built-in problem. The beam & hole will wear with use, particularly with softer woods, so you’ll need to twist the beam more before it locks. This skews the pin from its initial vertical position & mine is already 10 degrees or more past it’s starting point: MG 3.jpg

Eventually, the beam & hole may wear to the point it will no longer lock.

I suggest the easiest way to make a moveable stock is to use a wedge to lock the stock to the beam . You can make one in an hour or less, entirely with hand tools. Here’s a pretty old user-made gauge using the wedge principle. It appears to have been, made from scraps (each part is a different wood), & a nail was driven through the beam for the pin: MG 4.jpg MG 5.jpg.jpg

The pin end of the beam and the lower face of the stock are well worn, attesting to a life of service before it was chucked in a box of old tools & left in a back shed for a couple of decades. I think the wedge is a later addition, because it is more roughly-made than the other two parts. Small, loose wedge is easily lost, so it’s hardly surprising that the original wedge went AWOL at some point of time.

A partial solution to that problem is to make the wedge so it will be captured once fitted to the beam. Here is an example of a captured wedge. This gauge was made from a few scraps of Blackwood. It can be made entirely with hand tools and should present no major challenges to a beginner: MG 6.jpg

I used a sharpened nail for the marking pin: MG 7.jpg

A nail, by the way does a perfectly adequate job, after all, mild steel is still much harder than any wood. If you happen to have a broken 1/16” or 2mm drill bit, that will be tougher and stay sharp longer, but a nail will last a long time. The points on the old factory-made gauges were soft enough to file, in fact we were taught by our woodwork teacher to file a small ‘chisel point’ on our gauges so they would cause less tearing when used cross-grain. A handy hint if you only own a single marking gauge.

You may have noticed the old gauge above has both ends of its wedge chewed up from being whacked to tighten & release it. It isn’t necessary to strike the wedge with anything. If you keep the angle fairly shallow, something between 3-5 degrees (think Morse taper), it will lock easily & securely, with finger pressure. To release it for re-setting, just rap the appropriate end of the beam on the bench top.
A word on wood selection: Just about any medium to hard wood will do for a gauge, but try to choose something that is workable & won’t split to pieces when you chop out the mortise. Most of us like our tools to look handsome, but it’s probably not a good idea to select a highly-figured wood for your first attempt – make a couple from plainer, easily-managed woods first. The two pieces for stock & beam should be at equilibrium moisture content, or as near as it can be. If the beam is ‘wetter’ than the stock, you’ll have the annoying experience of making a gauge that works fine at first, then becomes horribly wobbly as the beam wood dries out & shrinks. A scrap of something like Blackwood is a good choice for your first attempt, it’s tough enough to be durable, but usually cuts crisply with a chisel. Hard, highly figured woods like Ringed Gidgee make beautiful & very functional gauges, but are more of a challenge to work with.

There are several variations on the wedge-locking theme. For starters, the wedge can be fitted across rather than along the beam: MG 8.jpg MG 9.jpg

With the wedge crosswise, it is less likely to cause the beam to move out of position as you tighten it, & also, it doesn’t stick out in front of the stock & get in the way if you are trying to mark very close to an obstruction (something that actually happens extremely rarely, in my experience!).
The ‘smiley’ wear-strip on the face of this Hairy-oak gauge is inlaid & held in place by some brass screws. The screws can be driven into counter-sinks & sanded flush, which is functionally fine, but spoils the look a bit. What I did in this case was to drill a very close hole for the screw, and make a small countersink, the screws were driven partway in, cut off and gently peened to fill the countersink. Filed & sanded flush, the screws disappear completely. You can also simply glue it in place with epoxy glue, but I’ve had the occasional failure of brass/wood joints with epoxy, so I always add the insurance of screws, or use sliding dovetails (see below).

You don’t have to have a wear strip on a simple gauge, it’s probably easier to just make a new one in the unlikely event the face of the stock wears significantly in your lifetime, but brass does add the bling factor.
Chopping a really clean mortise through a small block of hard wood like She-oak can be difficult and will certainly test the quality of your chisels. An alternative, which can yield a very neat, square mortise, is to cut the top off the stock & saw the sides of the mortise.
MG 10.jpg MG 11.jpg MG 12.jpg

The two pieces can then be glued back together to look like a single block (use a non-creep glue like Epoxy,if it is going to be under tension), or you could put a contrasting strip of wood (or brass, as Colen Clenton does), between them.

If you have a wood lathe, here’s another approach. Turn a round beam & wedge, & drill the holes in the stock for them. A flat planed on the beam mates with the wedge & prevents the beam from rotating in the stock. This is a quick & accurate way to make a wedge-locking gauge. Drill the wedge hole so it overlaps the beam hole by a few mm. Plane another small, slightly tapered flat on the wedge pin until you get a nice fit, with 8-10mm protrusion on both sides.

This Rosewood gauge was made to hold a pencil, obviously:MG 13.jpg MG 14.jpg

Pencil gauges are very handy tools for making lines that need to be erased later. Scribed lines can be planed out, of course, but you don’t always have that option.

To retain the pencil, I used a 3/16 brass screw. Tapping threads into end-grain is usually an exercise in frustration, so while the beam was still square, I fitted a cross-dowel of the same wood (you could use a contrasting wood), and drilled the pencil hole. Most firm, fine-grained woods can be tapped with a metal-threading tap across the grain & the resulting thread is surprisingly clean & durable. On this gauge, the pencil can be locked firmly in place quite easily with finger-pressure.

End part 1.....

**IanW** · 1st October 2018, 11:02 AM

One minor irritation with wedge-locked gauges is that things can move a bit as you tighten them down. You soon get used to setting the gauge quickly, tightening the wedge, then tapping one end or the other lightly on the bench top to finesse the setting. Using a thumbscrew to lock the stock makes it a little easier to set the gauge quickly. About 30-something years ago, I got into wood threading, and one of my first projects was to make gauges using wooden thumb-screws.
This Bull-oak cutting-gauge is a slavish copy of the Marples gauge I’d owned for years, the main difference the thumbscrew is made of wood instead of plastic as on the Marples:MG 15.jpg MG 16.jpg

I also glued a slip of brass underneath the tip of the beam, as much for decoration as for wear-protection. The cutter was ground from a snapped-off piece of hacksaw blade, & is retained by a brass wedge (thre's a bit of info on the making here). The trickiest part was chopping out the hole for the wedge & cutter, which I did by first drilling a hole through the brass & wood, then using a needle file to straighten the brass, and a chisel to shape the wedge slot in the wood. I made the wedge angle a bit steep & found it would let go if I pressed too hard on the gauge when I wanted a deep cut. I solved that problem by applying a tiny drop of PVA glue to each side of the wedge. It holds the wedge very securely, but can be loosened by a sharp tap when I need to remove the cutter for sharpening.

As you can see, on this gauge there are two narrow brass wear-strips dovetailed into the face of the stock, just like the ubiquitous factory-made gauges in everyone’s toolbox a few years ago. The dovetail trenches were cut with a ¼” D/T router bit, with the router mounted in a very basic home-made router table. The brass is best laid along the grain to avoid any problems with seasonal expansion & contraction of the wood. The factory-made gauges usually have a single brass pin driven into the wood through the centre of the strip to hold it in place, but I usually use epoxy glue instead. If you get a very tight fit of the brass in the dovetail trench, it doesn’t really need glue, but I still use it for a bit of insurance.
If you don’t have one already, it’s quite easy to make a ¼” dovetail bit by grinding the profile on a broken ¼” HSS twist drill. The angle isn’t super critical, & even if the two sides of your bit aren’t perfectly symmetrical, it will still cut an even-sided trench. This is my setup for cutting the dovetail trenches: MG 17.jpg

I usually prepare the brass strips beforehand and cut the trenches to fit. Despite my crude setup, it’s quite easy to sneak up on a very close fit.
The brass strips are hacksawed out of 1/8” brass plate, and filed to the approximate angle of the dovetail by eye. This is much easier to do than you may think. Because it’s such a shallow dovetail, your angles can be off by a degree or so but the fit will still look perfect.
Note that the grain of the stock is oriented ‘vertically’. This is principally so the thumbscrew hole can be tapped across the grain. Most woods will simply crumble if you try to tap them along the grain. However, the brass strips are better placed in the direction of least moisture-related movement (along the grain) so the edges remain flush with the wood in all seasons.
Commercial gauges are usually made with the thumbscrew bearing directly on the beam. This is not good with soft woods like Beech and you may have come across old gauges where the thumbscrew has worn a deep groove in the beam and the fit of beam & stock is decidedly wonky. Our very hard woods like Bull-oak (reputedly one of the hardest woods on earth) don’t suffer from that problem, and after years of use, there is not even a mark on the beams of my gauges.

A set of gauges like the one above served me very well for many years, and I would probably have gone on happily using them for the rest of my woodworking life, but acquiring a small metal lathe allowed me to easily make p[arts like brass thumbscrews & inserts & who can resist adding more brass to nice wood?

Previously, I had tried using the small brass thumbscrews and matching threaded inserts you can buy from places like LeeValley ( like the set on the right of the pic): Thumbscrews.jpg

They will do the job, but the knurled heads are rather small and the ¼” NC thread is both harder to tighten securely, & tends to come loose easily, which can be rather annoying if it lets go in the middle of scoring a line! The finer M6 threads I put on my home-made jobs (the one on the left),solve that problem, and putting deeper 16mm diameter heads on them is also much easier on arthritic fingers!

The threaded insert has an M10 outer thread and a collar so it can be screwed firmly into the wood. I usually use an intermediate tap, not the ‘full’ one, which means the thread is a little tight, ensuring the insert stays put when screwed in.

So I just had to make myself a set of more ‘refined’ gauges, with lots of brassy bits. This one is She-oak, a stable, tough wood that makes excellent gauges:
MG 19.jpg MG 20.jpg

On my earlier gauges, I’d followed the construction of the commercial gauge & placed the thumbscrew on the side of the stock, but after trying various combinations, I decided the most convenient place was on top. The grain of the stock is therefore rotated 90 degrees to allow a cross-grain thread for the insert. This orientation also allows the wear-strip to be placed across the face, where it makes most contact with the workpiece. And as a final bonus, the gauge is now equally convenient for left & right handers.
I also started using 16mm square bar to make solid brass tips for the beams, attached by a 6 x 12mm spigot turned on the bar. A little bit of thread on the spigot helps the epoxy glue to hold the tips on vey securely (I can vouch for that, having had to remove a couple when something went wrong!). You could make these tips without a lathe by threading a bit of ¼” brass rod into the back of the bar instead of turning the spigot. MG 21.jpg

A hole of the required diameter is drilled through the tip, and the pin or cutter is held by a 4mm grubscrew inserted from the front. For a pencil gauge, a small knurled thumbscrew is used to hold the pencil, since they need regular removal for sharpening.
At the instigation of FenceFurniture, I made a gauge to fit a mechanical pencil rather than the simple wooden type. Here it is compared with the first pencil gauge: MG 22.jpg

The theory was that the thin & constant diameter lead would give a fine & consistent line. With an ordinary pencil, even if you begin with a sharp point, it quickly wears & makes the line thicker. The mechanical pencil does indeed make a ‘better’ line, but they’ re much heavier than a stub of wooden pencil & make the gauge feel a bit unbalanced. And as you can see, there’s no way you could draw a line in a confined space! Since I only use pencil lines for rough layout, the thicker & less consistent lines are adequate in most situations, however, if you don’t need to use your gauge in a tight spot, & prefer the consistent fine lines of the mechanical pencil, it’s the better choice.

Instead of bits of hacksaw blade, I switched to round pins with cutting points ground on them for cutting gauges. There’s a bit more work making one, but it’s easier to fit to the gauge. Broken 3-4mm twist-drill bits are good raw material for cutters, but because they are too hard to file, all shaping has to be done with the grinder & diamond files. I mostly use 4mm bright steel rod, which comes annealed & can be easily shaped with a file, then hardened. After hardening, the flat is polished on an oilstone, & the back of the cutter refined with a fine diamond file. The pins are made from 2mm diameter rod. I rough-point them by chucking the pin in my battery drill & spinning the end lightly against a file. After hardening, I run it against a fine diamond file to polish & refine the point: MG 23.jpg

Of course metal screws would scuff up even Bull-oak beams pretty quickly without some protection. This is most easily provided by a metal shoe that can be positioned between the screw & the beam. My first solution was to use a strip of 1/16” brass, turned up on both ends to hold it in the mortise (as on the right in this pic): MG 24.jpg

That works well, enough, but then I decided it was neater to use a slightly thicker shoe (as on the left), retained by a small slug that is riveted through the shoe. The slug fits into the bottom of the thumbscrew hole

It takes a bit more effort to make & fit the new shoe, but looks neater, I think: MG 25.jpg MG 26.jpg

As mentioned previously, ensuring a good fit of the beam in the stock is important if you want your gauge to work smoothly & lock securely. The sides of the mortise must be both square to the face, & flat, or the face of the stock will not be perpendicular to the beam. And if the beam isn’t a snug fit, it can wobble even when you tighten the thumscrew. This has negligible effect on accuracy, because the small arc of movement only minutely alters the pin-to-stock distance, unless the wobble is extreme, but a wobbly gauge is very annoying to use.

The best method I’ve found to ensure a good fit for a square beam is to start by drilling as large a centre hole as safely possible, then carefully nibble it square with a sharp chisel. I then refine & smooth the surfaces with a coarse 8” file which has its edges ground ‘safe’.
One day I decided that round beams might be easier to make & easier to fit to their stocks than the traditional square beams. To make the beams, I start by drilling a hole for the tip spigot in the beam blank. The brass tip is inserted and the wood turned flush with the tip: MG 27.jpg

After checking that it fits neatly in the stock, I remove the tip from the beam & plane a flat section 6-10mm wide along what will become the MG 28.jpg

The tip is then epoxied in place, and when the glue has cured, the brass is filed flush with the flat on the wood, the whole thing is finish-sanded & polished.

It's a bit of faffing about, but I think it is well worth the effort: MG 29.jpg MG 30.jpg

The flat on the beam mates with a narrow shoe let into the top of the hole. These gauges have turned out to be very satisfying to use. You need to pay attention to getting the diameter of the beam constant, so that with the thumbscrew backed off just a little, the beam slides smoothly without twisting. Fitting the brass shoe inside the stock is a minor challenge given the rather confined space. I’ve made a special little saw that fits into the hole, for cutting the sides of the trench, but there’s not much room to manoeuvre, and a slip with either saw or chisel can ruin the job very quickly!

The round beam is also very comfortable to hold, as I expected, but I discovered it has an additional bonus. Even if your beam shrinks and becomes a looser fit in the stock hole, it still locks very firmly, without excessive screw pressure, and has zero wobble. This is because a good part of the circumference is pushed against the bottom of the hole. You simply adjust the shoe-pressure with the thumbscrew, and the stock will continue to slide very smoothly on the beam, no matter what time of year it is – very satisfying.

End part 2 - next, mortising gauges....

**IanW** · 1st October 2018, 11:32 AM

If you have a couple of pin gauges, you don’t really need a mortise gauge, you can set one gauge for the ‘right’ side of the mortise, & another for the ‘left’. However, marking both lines at once with the one gauge is convenient & has certain advantages. Besides, most of us need little excuse to acquire another nice tool!

Most mortise gauges use two pins, one fixed and the other moveable, with some method of locking it & the stock in any desired position. (Japanese style gauges use two moveable cutters, which are set, then locked in the stock by a wedge or thumbscrew.)

The simplest method of providing a moveable pin, and one which I used for my first attempt at a mortise gauge many years back, is to cut a trench on the bottom of the beam, and fit a brass strip to carry the moving pin. After setting the pins, and the distance from the edge, locking the stock also locks the sliding pin in position: MG 31.jpg MG 32.jpg

The brass slider is usually made as a sliding dovetail – it doesn’t have to be dovetailed, but I think that works better than a straight-sided slider, it keeps it in the trench when the stock is loosened. Dovetailing it doesn’t add much complication to the build. The challenge is getting the trench the right depth, so that there is just enough brass standing proud of the beam for the stock or thumbscrew to lock it firmly in position. On commercial gauges, the thumbscrew is usually placed underneath the stock, so that it bears directly on the brass slide, but I’ve found it can work just as well with the thumbscrew on the opposite side (i.e. on top), and is more convenient to get at when adjusting. The pin can be a press-fit in the brass slider, but I think it’s safer to silver-solder it in place, or at least use some Loctite. Keep the pins short, so there isn’t excessive side-pressure on the slider pin in use.

This style of gauge works fine, but even if you start with the slider as a good firm fit, it inevitably loosens up after a while, making it harder to keep it in position while you set & lock the fence. It can be a bit of a circus setting the gauge accurately, one of those times when you wish you had 3 hands! I find the best way is to take a scrap of wood of the same thickness as the piece in which the mortise is to be made in, and press the chisel I intend to use into the top. It doesn’t need to be exactly centred, just make it as close to the middle as your eyeball allows. Then set the inter-pin gap, by pressing them into the wood either side of the chisel mark, slide the stock up snugly, & tighten down. Reverse the gauge, and if the points match, you have your mortise or tenon centred, if not, you have to adjust the stock to get them halfway between the two sets of marks. With a little practice, you’ll get it right on the first or second try, but a much better arrangement is to add a screw mechanism to the slider so the pin distance will stay put while you set & re-set the stock.

I posted my first attempt at a screw-operated mortise gauge a long time back, this example in Dead-Finish is Mk 3 or 4: MG 33.jpg MG 34.jpg

Making one of these will test your ability to work accurately! The most demanding bit is getting the long screw-hole in the beam to intersect precisely with the centre of the brass barrel-nut, so that the screw can travel in & out without fouling the sides of its hole. Making the screw-hole about 0.5-1mm oversize gives you a bit of wriggle-room, and ensures the screw doesn’t bind on the sides.
Attaching a right-angled piece on the slider for the adjuster screw to engage is not too difficult, but you need to work carefully to keep it straight & square. I start with a “double-dovetail” cut out with a jewellers saw: MG 35.jpg
The joint is then peened together, flipping the assembly & constantly checking that it remains square & straight. This forms a pretty solid joint, but I silver solder it for good measure. After cleaning up, you are have a neat, strong joint: MG 36.jpg

Don’t drill the screw hole until you’ve joined the two bits. I tried pre-drilling, because it’s more convenient, but I’ve found that even though I think I’m working with great precision, the upright piece may slew a bit to right or left during peening, so it’s safer to mark & drill after the join has been made. For the same reason, I make the vertical arm a bit wider than the dovetailed piece, and file it true after joining, if it ends up a little out of whack.

So that part is easy enough, but if you don’t have a metal lathe, you need to be a bit more creative to find a way to neck down the screw so it can be captured in the slider by the thumbscrew knob. It can be achieved by chucking the screw in a drill & forming a spigot with a file (very carefully, and with constant checking to get the correct diameter). You can make knurled knobs from brass rod using a drill press, but setting up the knurling tool (that you just happen to have!) takes some imagination. It’s quite easy to make a ‘butterfly knob (like the ones on old gauges) from a bit of brass bar, which can either be threaded onto the shaft, or held on with Loctite (which requires a reasonably good fit if the Loctite is to hold securely).
Gauges like this have been around for more than a century, and hold up well with a bit of care, but they do have a weak point. If the gauge is dropped when the slider is screwed out a long way for a wide mortise, some serious injury is likely to occur, and does - it’s not uncommon to come across old gauges with bent or broken sliders.

And so, the ultimate mortise gauge was born:

Justus Traut of the Stanley Works came up with very clever solution to the problem of damaged sliders. He designed a gauge where the mechanism is wholly contained within the beam. (If you type ‘Stanley 77 gauge’ into your search engine you’ll find plenty of pictures of 77s). The patent was granted in 1872, and the gauge was manufactured for about 30 years thereafter. It’s a very clever idea, so I’m surprised it had such a relatively short life, but it would have been expensive to make, & perhaps tradesmen of the time couldn’t see enough of an advantage to justify the price. But the first time I set eyes on one I fell in lust immediately, although it took me quite a while to get round to making mine. I had to figure out how to make the inside bits of brass with sufficient accuracy, but eventually I managed to produce one:
MG 37.jpg MG 38.jpg

I won’t go into great details of the construction here, it’s a project for someone with either a lot of patience or access to some serious metalworking gear, but if you’d like more detail I posted on it at the time.

I’ve made a couple in this style now, but it doesn’t get any easier, it’s certainly not an economical gauge to produce! However, they do work well and I’m pleased I took the challenge.

So there you have it – my personal odyssey through the marking gauge world up to now. As I said at the start, I wasn't going to try to cover every possible way to make gauges, just the ones I've actually made at some point, with some comments on problems I've encountered or tricky construction bits. So if I’ve left out anyone’s favourite way of making a marking gauge, feel free to add it to this post, we may as well make it as complete as it can be (if I haven't exhausted your patience already

.....)

Cheers,

**Simplicity** · 1st October 2018, 08:26 PM

Ian,
Fantastic write up that’s normal from you
Thanks for going to such a massive effort
I hope we see a few Ian inspired marking gauges shown here in the next few weeks/months.

Cheers Matt,

**Chief Tiff** · 1st October 2018, 10:41 PM

Thanks for the more in-depth lessons on making gauges; I intend to make a few different styles for my woodworking guild tool room and for sale at the annual expos. And just to let you know; my go-to gauge is the tulip wood pencil gauge you very kindly donated to me at the 2016 TWWW show!

**Chris Parks** · 2nd October 2018, 01:18 AM

Ian, seeing the finished product and then being able to see how it is done is a fantastic bonus. Thanks heaps for your contribution to woodwork in Oz over the years.

**Robson Valley** · 2nd October 2018, 02:46 AM

Most reassuring to read in Part 3 the value of having several marking gauges.
And, they don't have to be fancy. I've used as many as 3 at a time for a large wood carving.
Various parts must have a left/right symmetry center line for as long as possible.

**IanW** · 2nd October 2018, 08:19 AM

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

........I've used as many as 3 at a time ........

RV, I'd be lost without my drawer-full of gauges. Yesterday, I was 'helping' my daughter make a small step-stool & we had 3 gauges on the go - a pin, a cutter, and a mortise gauge. When you have several gauges on the bench at once, it helps that they are different sizes & different woods, so I can recognise which one I want!

And while no tool needs to be pretty to do it's job well, most of us do like 'em that way, don't we? Gauges are a great way to use those offcuts of precious wood that we all end up with, too small to do anything much with, but too nice to chuck in the firewood pile.

Yes please, lets see an avalanche of user-made gauges - might see some good ideas I can plagiarise......

Avagooday,

**ian** · 2nd October 2018, 09:32 AM

Ian

Thank you for posting such a detailed and entertaining description of making a marking / mortise gauge.

While I can't post any pics of a shop made gauge, I can comment on

Originally Posted by IanW

At the instigation of FenceFurniture, I made a gauge to fit a mechanical pencil rather than the simple wooden type. Here it is compared with the first pencil gauge:
MG 22.jpg

The theory was that the thin & constant diameter lead would give a fine & consistent line. With an ordinary pencil, even if you begin with a sharp point, it quickly wears & makes the line thicker. The mechanical pencil does indeed make a ‘better’ line, but they’ re much heavier than a stub of wooden pencil & make the gauge feel a bit unbalanced. And as you can see, there’s no way you could draw a line in a confined space! Since I only use pencil lines for rough layout, the thicker & less consistent lines are adequate in most situations, however, if you don’t need to use your gauge in a tight spot, & prefer the consistent fine lines of the mechanical pencil, it’s the better choice.

back when I started engineering 45 years ago, we were taught that if you sharpen a pencil to a chisel point, you will get a consistently "thin" line for a long time before you need to resharpen the pencil.
I've found that a similar strategy works for pencil gauges.

**Bushmiller** · 2nd October 2018, 10:47 AM

Ian

Excellent write ups. I have only read the first one so far and am looking forward to getting stuck into the other two tonight.

Regards
Paul

**poundy** · 2nd October 2018, 02:11 PM

I really appreciate the job you've done (pretty much at my behest

) and I hope to crack on with making myself some of these - perhaps I'll get a break from the day job sometime before Christmas?

Out of interest I don't suppose you've seen a commercial alternative source of threaded insert / knurled knob? I suspected that this would be the tricky part to buy, and my initial investigations seemed to confirm that... Thanks for noting you create yours with M6 thread as that was about what I guessed, but could have easily been +/- 3mm

**surfdabbler** · 2nd October 2018, 03:29 PM

Great article, thanks Ian! I've been looking at my marking gauge recently and thinking it's time for an upgrade. I rarely use my marking gauge, but it looks nice on my bench, and it's nice to use these things when I do have an excuse.

**Chris Parks** · 2nd October 2018, 04:12 PM

Originally Posted by poundy

I really appreciate the job you've done (pretty much at my behest

) and I hope to crack on with making myself some of these - perhaps I'll get a break from the day job sometime before Christmas?

Out of interest I don't suppose you've seen a commercial alternative source of threaded insert / knurled knob? I suspected that this would be the tricky part to buy, and my initial investigations seemed to confirm that... Thanks for noting you create yours with M6 thread as that was about what I guessed, but could have easily been +/- 3mm

Have a look at this link. https://www.google.com.au/search?cli....0.SOCnZ_nmzRo

**Bushmiller** · 2nd October 2018, 04:44 PM

Originally Posted by poundy

I really appreciate the job you've done (pretty much at my behest

) and I hope to crack on with making myself some of these - perhaps I'll get a break from the day job sometime before Christmas?

Out of interest I don't suppose you've seen a commercial alternative source of threaded insert / knurled knob? I suspected that this would be the tricky part to buy, and my initial investigations seemed to confirm that... Thanks for noting you create yours with M6 thread as that was about what I guessed, but could have easily been +/- 3mm

poundy

I'm pretty certain that Derek Cohen has an alternative to knurled nuts and he may be able to elaborate on that. I seem to recall that it used a brass (or brass lookalike) irrigation /hose fitting.

Regards
Paul

**Simplicity** · 2nd October 2018, 05:31 PM

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

Have a look at this link. https://www.google.com.au/search?cli....0.SOCnZ_nmzRo

Ian Should put you at top of the class for that find there Chris [emoji106][emoji106][emoji106][emoji106][emoji106].

Cheers Matt

Thread: Marking gauges 101 (& beyond) Part 1

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