I needed to clean out an area at the right end of the secondary work bench so the wall can be used to mount the Plano Vertical Panel Press. That required removing a couple of wall cabinets and re-installing one of them. In turn the cabinet install required cutting down the length of a couple of shelfs used for chisel and plane storage. Not to bore you but you should get the picture, moving one thing required moving two others which in turn required emptying and moving four other storage areas.
In the moving of storage units I found a number of marking gauges that had been squirreled away for various reasons. Ended up being close to thirty of 'em, most of which had been put away because I found them lacking in some way. Many because the fence and stem would not lock at 90 degrees. BTW, I posted about the marking gauges on SMC earlier.
Anyway here's a photo of the herd, the most used ones are near the rear:
A photo that may show what I'm talking about. I pulled three example marking gauges out of the pile. One was my goto kinda high dollar Marples combination gauge, next was a cheap as you can buy Marples combination gauge, and last was a pretty high dollar marking gauge from one of the better woodworking retailers.
Pay no attention to that round blue thing at the bottom but from left to right the better Marples, the cheap Marples, and the not very cheap gauge. The lines were made by locking the stem then putting fairly light pressure left and knifing a line followed by approximately the same pressure right and making a knife line. The right two knife lines diverge at about 2 degrees.
Is it easy to fix? Yep, all the maker has to do is pay attention to where the locking screw pushes the stem.
As always YMMV and does it make a big whoop, not really just me being cranky but one thing I hate is a marking gauge fence that wiggles once locked. Even it there is no chance of it moving fore or aft the wiggle bugs the hell out of me.
ken
So what in the world are you going to do with all those gauges that you no longer use? Too light and buoyant for boat anchors. Show-pieces in a display cabinet?
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteA common shop cleaning dilemma, thibgs that are maybe too good to just throw in the trash, but can't sell, and not good enough to give away unless it is to someone that likes to tinker more than work wood.
I cleared a spot in one of the cabinets and hid most of 'en there, so the next time I have a shop cleaning frenzy I'll have to deal with them again. It is never ending :-).
ken