BUTT GAUGE
One challenging step common to the making of many box-like structures requiring accurately pivoting lids, lights or doors – from ditty box, hatch, skylight and cabin locker through to the cabin itself – is the fitting of hinges.
The joinery may well be just so with dovetails nice as ninepence, the door precisely planed for that mere shadow of all-round clearance necessary, yet how high can appear that final hurdle of installing the butt hinges. All it takes is for one hinge to be out of line, set too deep in its mortise or not deep enough, and the door will bind (not close fully) or jam, thereafter remaining a source of annoyance.
Our great-grandparents hinging cabin doors in late Victorian times would have scribed the matching mortises in stile and jamb using the sharp pin of a joiner’s wooden marking gauge. If using a single gauge, the position of its stock upon the stem would be readjusted between scribing the gain – the width of hinge mortised into the stile or jamb, measured from the edge of the leaf to the centre of the knuckle – and then scribing the depth of the mortise, a measurement taken from the thickness of the leaf. The readjustment would be prone to human error but this was avoided by using a pair of marking gauges, one set for each measurement, meanwhile using a try-square to scribe at right angles for the two ends of each mortise.
Through the 1890s the Stanley Rule & Level Company of Connecticut, USA had been developing a wooden butt gauge clearly based on the familiar joiners’ tool but equipped with two independently adjustable pins. Then in 1911 the company’s prolific designer Christian Bodmer patented the critical inventive step for what was to become the go-to tool in fitting hinges, ultimately consigning the bulky wooden joiners’ gauge to hinging history. Stanley’s delightfully compact No 95 Butt Gauge neatly housed a pair of sliding bars, each locked by a knurled screw. One bar with a spur at each end is used for scribing identical gains on stile and jamb, while its single-spurred counterpart is for scribing the mortise depth. The No 95’s lipped four-square casting also functions as a try-square for scribing the ends of mortises, thus neatly combining the functions of three tools in one rugged device.
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