Dr.Al
Old Oak
After seeing Mike's beautiful marking gauges, I thought it might be an interesting little project to have a go at. I thought I'd post a WIP so that you can see all the mistakes I make along the way.
I started with this pile of bits: a lump of cherry, a lump of beech and a length of 16 mm beech dowel:
The first job was to hack the bit of cherry down to size a bit using my portable workbench and ryoba:
Then I marked it out at 32 mm, thinking I'd saw it off wide of that line and stand a fighting chance of getting a 30 mm ish thick piece out of it:
Must try harder:
At least I'd left plenty of extra material on there! Next was a quick attack with a #4 to get it as close to parallel as my skills allow (which is to say, not very parallel!)
With that done, I could mark out a 60 mm diameter circle to give the shape that will form the body of the marking gauge (I'll flatten one side at some point so it doesn't roll of the bench, but that's a job for much further down the line).
I then used the compasses in pointy stick mode to mark a second hole location 18 mm from the centre:
I'd planned at this point to try out my recently-acquired second-hand brace, but it turns out that the bits I have start at 6 mm and go up in 3 mm increments, so I don't have one that's 16 mm to match the dowel. Unlike Mike, I don't have a friend with a wood lathe, so I'd rather stick to the size of the dowel. I do have a 16 mm Forstner bit and I guess I could have tried putting that in the brace, but not having used the brace before I thought I'd start with a auger bit when I used that and so I went over to the pillar drill instead (I'm not sure the C-clamp is really necessary for a hole like this, but I figured it was better safe than sorry):
I then drilled out the offset hole, starting with a 6 mm wood drill and then following with a 6.3 mm HSS drill:
Now it was time to hack the bit of cherry down to somewhere near final size. For that it was back to the portable workbench and ryoba:
I really didn't expect this to work given the lack of contact area right over at one end of the vice, but it was quicker than any other method I could think of and it worked absolutely fine:
With that done, I stuck it back in the portable workbench vice and attacked with the fine side of my rasp:
When it was getting close to size, I put a small length of dowel in the vice and rotated the cherry block with my left hand while rasping it with my right:
I used one of the bench dog hole fillers from my bench with a screw fitted to it to draw a 20 mm diameter circle centred on the offset hole. With hindsight I probably could have done this more easily before drilling the hole out, but this worked fine:
I then drew some lines tangential to the newly drawn circle at an angle that looked about right by eye, transferred the lines round the edge and marked a couple of joining lines 10 mm apart in the middle of the stock:
More to follow....
I started with this pile of bits: a lump of cherry, a lump of beech and a length of 16 mm beech dowel:
The first job was to hack the bit of cherry down to size a bit using my portable workbench and ryoba:
Then I marked it out at 32 mm, thinking I'd saw it off wide of that line and stand a fighting chance of getting a 30 mm ish thick piece out of it:
Must try harder:
At least I'd left plenty of extra material on there! Next was a quick attack with a #4 to get it as close to parallel as my skills allow (which is to say, not very parallel!)
With that done, I could mark out a 60 mm diameter circle to give the shape that will form the body of the marking gauge (I'll flatten one side at some point so it doesn't roll of the bench, but that's a job for much further down the line).
I then used the compasses in pointy stick mode to mark a second hole location 18 mm from the centre:
I'd planned at this point to try out my recently-acquired second-hand brace, but it turns out that the bits I have start at 6 mm and go up in 3 mm increments, so I don't have one that's 16 mm to match the dowel. Unlike Mike, I don't have a friend with a wood lathe, so I'd rather stick to the size of the dowel. I do have a 16 mm Forstner bit and I guess I could have tried putting that in the brace, but not having used the brace before I thought I'd start with a auger bit when I used that and so I went over to the pillar drill instead (I'm not sure the C-clamp is really necessary for a hole like this, but I figured it was better safe than sorry):
I then drilled out the offset hole, starting with a 6 mm wood drill and then following with a 6.3 mm HSS drill:
Now it was time to hack the bit of cherry down to somewhere near final size. For that it was back to the portable workbench and ryoba:
I really didn't expect this to work given the lack of contact area right over at one end of the vice, but it was quicker than any other method I could think of and it worked absolutely fine:
With that done, I stuck it back in the portable workbench vice and attacked with the fine side of my rasp:
When it was getting close to size, I put a small length of dowel in the vice and rotated the cherry block with my left hand while rasping it with my right:
I used one of the bench dog hole fillers from my bench with a screw fitted to it to draw a 20 mm diameter circle centred on the offset hole. With hindsight I probably could have done this more easily before drilling the hole out, but this worked fine:
I then drew some lines tangential to the newly drawn circle at an angle that looked about right by eye, transferred the lines round the edge and marked a couple of joining lines 10 mm apart in the middle of the stock:
More to follow....
