It was just 6 years ago that I posted my 'new' set of everyday marking gauges. I'd acquired a small metal lathe which is just the ticket for making small parts like brass thumb-screws, so had to find jobs that needed small turned parts - marking gauges are just the thing!

New set 2012.jpg

So my perfectly functional, all-wood gauges got pushed aside in favour of these new ones. It wasn't all just appearance, there were a few aspects of my new gauges I thought improved their function. For starters, I made the stocks a bit wider & deeper than the roughly 50 x 50mm socks on my old set, which had been slavishly copied from the ubiquitous hardware-store gauge:

Marples style.jpg

Another change, which I'd started with the mortise gauge shown above, was adding a brass tip on the beam. This is drilled through for the pin or cutter, which is held securely by a 4mm grub screw. I makes it so much easier to remove pins for sharpening or replacement.

One problem common to all gauges with square or nearly-square beams is that the beams wear over time and also expand & contract, which allows wobble. Over-tightening the thumbscrew to minimise the wobble is a common cause of damage on old gauges. Now, turning a spigot on a bit of square brass needs a 4-jaw chuck & a lot of fiddling to set it up accurately. It also takes a lot of effort to get a close fit to the beam, so one day I got the idea of making a gauge with a round tip on a turned beam. By fitting the tip to the beam first, it should be a simple matter to turn the wood down to match the brass. A flat planed along the top edge of he beam would engage a brass shoe trapped in the stock, and prevent the beam from swivelling in the stock: Hairy oak.jpg

It all went pretty much according to plan, although fitting the brass shoe neatly in the round beam-hole was a rather fiddly process. The gauge worked very smoothly and the round beam is very comfortable to hold. But the real virtue only became obvious in use - a round beam is much easier to lock with zero wobble, at any time of year. Even at the driest time, with the beam slightly shrunken, leaving a bit of a gap around the top, there is lots of wood to wood contact and the beam sits very firmly.

I can't believe I'm the first person to make a round-beam gauge. It seems to me it could offer some advantages for people making large numbers, so why aren't there more out there? Is there some catch that I haven't yet discovered?

My most recent 'advance' was a pencil-gauge using a propelling pencil. I'd thought about trying it in the past, but rejected the idea because the pencils are so long & awkward, until a request from me old mate FF prompted me to give it a go. I couldn't get the pencil Brett suggested, but got one of these instead. It has a nice, solid metal end for clamping in the gauge, but needs a two-step hole in the brass tip for a neat fit: b.jpg

It worked well, though as I feared, the tall pencil makes it a bit awkward to use, particularly in confined spaces: Prop pencil gauge Flame oak.jpg

Being able to make a thin, highly consistent line is a plus, though I also worry there'll be a lot of lead breakages. Most of the time when I use a pencil gauge, the fineness of he line isn't of much concern, but there are times when it matters, so maybe the solution is to have both?:

Prop pencil gauges cf.jpg


Cheers