Thread: Multi-purpose marking gauge

Gotta love a nice bit of lateral thinking Ian.

Good job!

do you offer retrofit upgrades?

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

Gotta love a nice bit of lateral thinking Ian.

Good job!

Thanks Brett - for once my idea seems to have worked better than expected, but I have to confess my 'lateral thinking' sometimes goes to the left when it was supposed to go right.....

Originally Posted by poundy

do you offer retrofit upgrades?

Actually, I did briefly consider doing something similar for one of my smaller gauges, but unless it's got the slightly longer brass tip I use for pencil gauges, there isn't enough metal to take the 8mm hole required & still leave a decent bit of thread for the thumbscrew...

Cheers,

Take out a patent, that's a winner

Nice work Ian

You seem to be doing a fair bit of the dark stuff lately(Metal work)????

Cheers Matt,

Originally Posted by rwbuild

Take out a patent, that's a winner

What he said! I reckon the brass bit with the point and cutter would sell like hot cakes to anyone wanting to retro fit a gauge.
Regards
John

Originally Posted by orraloon

What he said! I reckon the brass bit with the point and cutter would sell like hot cakes to anyone wanting to retro fit a gauge....

John & Ray - not quite as easy as it may look. For starters you need a brass tip on the beam, or some provision for tapping a thread to hold the cutter/point assembly. Drilling out one of my brass tips can work if it's not too short to take the necessary 8mm hole. The other problem is safely drilling the holes in the brass. As I'm sure some of you know, brass loves to grab the drill & 'self feed'. Bushmiller certainly knows; I was drilling out a tip for him one day & rabbiting on about this (instead of giving full attention to what I was doing!) & wham, the drill grabbed, pulled the beam out of the DP vise & damn-near wrecked the thing. I think I made my point a bit too well!

In any case, I betcha London to a brick someone has thought of something like this long ago & probably patented it. There was something I dreamed up recently (can't remember what it was now), which I subsequently found had been patented before - about 150 years before, in fact. So anyone who wishes to use this cutter/pin idea, you are most welcome, and if you can make them efficiently & profitably, you have my admiration as well as my blessing..

Matt, yeah, been doing a bit of mucking about with my little lathe these last few weeks - they are addictive things, so I need to get away from it for a while. I have about 6 cubic metres of fallen branches & yard trimmings to mulch, so that will get me out of the shed & give me some thinking time...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

John & Ray - not quite as easy as it may look. For starters you need a brass tip on the beam, or some provision for tapping a thread to hold the cutter/point assembly. Drilling out one of my brass tips can work if it's not too short to take the necessary 8mm hole. The other problem is safely drilling the holes in the brass. As I'm sure some of you know, brass loves to grab the drill & 'self feed'. Bushmiller certainly knows; I was drilling out a tip for him one day & rabbiting on about this (instead of giving full attention to what I was doing!) & wham, the drill grabbed, pulled the beam out of the DP vise & damn-near wrecked the thing. I think I made my point a bit too well!

In any case, I betcha London to a brick someone has thought of something like this long ago & probably patented it. There was something I dreamed up recently (can't remember what it was now), which I subsequently found had been patented before - about 150 years before, in fact. So anyone who wishes to use this cutter/pin idea, you are most welcome, and if you can make them efficiently & profitably, you have my admiration as well as my blessing..

Matt, yeah, been doing a bit of mucking about with my little lathe these last few weeks - they are addictive things, so I need to get away from it for a while. I have about 6 cubic metres of fallen branches & yard trimmings to mulch, so that will get me out of the shed & give me some thinking time...

Cheers,

Ian,

Mr Clickspring
Of the YouTube fame has a video .
On how he modified twist drills to not be so graby
I will see if I can find it,
I’m pretty sure he just put a relive cut behind the cutting edge ,but don’t quote me.

Cheers Matt.
You know you can run from the metal lathe but it will always be there[emoji33][emoji6]



Just found the YouTube link

YouTube

Ian

I think you have made, very nicely I might add, a "nest" of gauges. The reason I say this is because I have a "nest" of screwdrivers:

P1050157 (Medium).JPGP1050158 (Medium).JPGP1050159 (Medium).JPGP1050160 (Medium).JPG

No problem storing this little lot as I keep them on me at work all the time.

What size did your panel gauges end up?

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Ian

I think you have made, very nicely I might add, a "nest" of gauges. The reason I say this is because I have a "nest" of screwdrivers:

P1050157 (Medium).JPGP1050158 (Medium).JPGP1050159 (Medium).JPGP1050160 (Medium).JPG

No problem storing this little lot as I keep them on me at work all the time.

What size did your panel gauges end up?

Regards
Paul

My dad at one of them
Thanks Paul I ask mum if she knows of it
My other siblings would just toss it in the bin [emoji849]
I might ask mum if I was adopted too[emoji849].

Cheers Matt

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

...... What size did your panel gauges end up? ....

HUGE!

OK, to be sensible, it's not as big as some - they do come bigger, & in fact, I made one as a custom job that had a 600mm beam. It was a copy of an old one of this chap's father. The stock on the one I just finished is about 150mm wide & 34mm thick, and the shaft is 22mm diameter & a few mm shy of 500 long: Blk wattle panel G b.jpg

You can't really judge the size from the picture of it alone, so sometime I'll take a pic of it with a more 'normal' gauge for comparison.

Purists will probably hasten to point out it's not actually a 'panel gauge', just a big marking gauge. A panel gauge usually has a step on the face of the stock, like this: She-oak panel G a.jpg

The step makes it a lot easier to use when the point or cutter is set a long way from the stock. You can push on the stock with one hand and hold the cutter/point end with the other hand to keep it parallel & cutting. It's far easier than using a simple plain-faced stock in that situation. Unfortunately, there are also some situations where the step is a nuisance, and that's why I made the Black Wattle behemoth.

That created an accommodation crisis, which is why I came up with my point/cutter/pencil idea - now I can fit 6 gauges in the space of two. There might be a couple of 'spares' on the market in a month or two when I get around to fitting them with the same system....

Cheers,

Hi Ian, found the thread! On the issue of drilling brass, my grandfather was a fitter and turner and I always remember him saying with brass you have to dull the points/cutters on the bit to stop it from grabbing. Saw him do it once, he simply reduced the cutting angle of the bit to almost nothing. Still cut perfectly well because of how soft the brass is and then he resharpened the bit when he was done.

Ps let me know when the ‘spares’ are about to hit the market

Originally Posted by IanW

.....You can't really judge the size from the picture of it alone, so sometime I'll take a pic of it with a more 'normal' gauge for comparison....

As promised, here's a shot of the big mutha alongside one of my 'regular' gauges: Cf.jpg

Cheers,