Woodworking: Make a panel gauge. (Project one of four.)

A new year means a new series of woodworking build articles that will show you how to create handcrafted tools for your workshop. With more and more people working with Baltic birch plywood and MDF, a panel marking gauge is an essential item. This is how you make one.

WE ALWAYS try to give our workshopmade tools a bit of style and flair – after all, they will adorn the walls of your workshop and should be a pleasure to build, view, hold and use. On the end of our panel-gauge beam, we fitted a standard pencil.

The gauge is dead easy to adjust and use. Following these instructions, it should only take a few hours to make.

For materials, search through your special off-cut stock or, better still, visit rarewoods.co.za and choose some attractive wood for the project. We chose to showcase African padauk and hard maple. I’ve been a loyal client of Rare Woods since their inception in the early ’80s, and my visits to the Cape Town and Knysna warehouses have always made me feel like a kid in a candy store. Brendan and Seamus HarcourtWood of Rare Woods South Africa have again generously sponsored exquisite woods for this workshop-tool project.

PANEL GAUGE

This tool is simply a marking gauge on steroids. How many times have you needed to draw a line at a specific distance from an edge that’s further than the available beam length of your standard 300 mm combination square or try square? For most of us, this involves makeshift methods, which result in compounding errors and inaccurate results.

By using an all-wood gauge, you won’t mar your workpieces, and you can even make a few beams of different lengths to suit your specific work requirements.

LOCKING MECHANISM

There are several methods to precisely and firmly lock the beam and your pencil into position. Because most of us aren’t competent metalworkers, we’ve chosen a centuries-old locking method involving a tapered and captive-held wedge of wood that engages or disengages lock mode with a firm thumb press, or by tapping with a small hammer.

MATERIALS

» Headstock: 254 mm long × 100 mm wide × 40 mm thick

» Beam: 900 mm long × 44 mm wide × 24 mm thick

» Beam locking wedge: 104 mm long × 26 mm wide × 10 mm thick

» Pencil locking wedge: 76 mm long × 20 mm wide × 8 mm thick

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