Guest
Nobody is taking umbrage at the notion of square squares.Originally Posted by Alan Wright
It's just how square do they need to be? If in the classic test of a square used in woodworking - knife a line, flip square, knife another line very close to the first one, no real divergence can be detected by eye then the square is plenty square enough, especially after Wilbur's post informing us how sensitive our sight really is.
[OP]
Guest
Alan:
Thanks for the comments.
I don't see the comments of those that disagree as umbrage, and even if they are, they don't bother me.
I understand why the cost of the tools I recommended can be a real problem for some. I know what it is like to not have enough cash to buy a tool I thought I really needed. For six years I was a poor engineering student in Utah, with a wife and three babies, supporting my young family and paying all my school and living expenses single handedly by working as a carpenter during the summers and a cabinetmaker during the school months. Back then, aside from a steel framing square, an ancient Disston D-8 and a battered old skillsaw I bought at flea markets, and four bent and rusty bar clamps, all the tools I owned fit into a single apple crate. Nearly everything my wife and I owned back then was either made by ourselves or bought used from garage sales and flea markets. College towns have great flea markets. We were very poor but those were good times for us.
As many that contributed to this thread have correctly pointed out, there are other ways to achieve the same results without spending $400. The first essential tool is a decent straightedge. This thread talks about traditional ways of making one yourself. http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...n-Straightedge You might want to pay attention to the links to a book titled Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. Cool stuff. I wish I had read it years ago. There are also other sources on the web and in old books.
Or with some luck you can buy a decent inexpensive straightedge that will be adequate.
Using this straightedge as a guide, you can follow the method Charlie Stanford outlined to check your square. If you find that your square is out of wack, you can use files, stones, glass, and sandpaper along with your straightedge to true it. If you are careful, it will then be plenty accurate, and you will have gained a new skill.
The more expensive tools I recommended save time and give a man ongoing confidence that his other tools are performing as intended. At least, I think so. It logically follows that, if a man knows his tools are performing correctly, Murphy loses some power over him, and he must acknowledge to himself that any errors that creep into his work are the fault of his own hand/eye/intelligence, and cannot be blamed for long on a square that might have become damaged when it was dropped yesterday, or a worn-out dial caliper, for example. Removing the variable of suspicious tools from the equation can help a guy improve his skills significantly, but that will happen only if he wants to improve his speed and accuracy.
But for the guy that is happy with the skills he has and the quality of the things he makes (and there is NOTHING wrong with that) owning such tools is illogical, and he would be wasting his money to buy them. But I think some folks find it irritating for me to suggest their tools might have problems, ergo the objections. No problemo.
In my opinion, in the case of a man that uses his tools to feed his family, any tools that waste his limited time or decrease the quality of his work product are guilty of stealing bread from his family's table. Such a man may have no choice but to use crappy tools, but he will not be satisfied with them once he learns he has options. The men of my family have been carpenters, cabinetmakers, masons, and plasterers in America and England for at least 300 something years, according to my Father, Uncles, Grandfather, Great Grandfather, two dusty diaries, and my brother that double-checked my Grandmother's geneaology work by investigating the church and tax records in Olde Blighty. So I suppose my lack of tolerance of questionable tools is an inherited attitude.
But for the newbie, the guy with little cash, the hobbyist, or the guy that doesn't need or value more precise work, the tools I recommended are unimportant. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Stan
Last edited by Stanley Covington; 02-14-2013 at 10:41 PM.
Member
The lines have been drawn, the specs loaded, and now both sides shall fire at each other, who will prevail?
If you eschew precision instruments in your shop then you can't even comment on their worth now can you? You haven't used them so your opinions are pure speculation as to their worth. And your opinion should come with a grain of salt...
If you build to drawings and specs which some of us do, you too would find precision measuring tools very useful. If you build musical instruments or any other object where repeatability is paramount then you will use precision measuring instruments. Take a moment and google cane flyrod building - gasp - precision measuring instruments and handplanes on the same bench!
I can build a mortise and tenon joint with out a dial caliper using hand tools and I often do. I can also build a floating tenon joint and a dial caliper can help me cut to the chase faster than without.
If your arguement is that these tools have no place in woodworking you are talking nonsense. If your arguement is that you can't do good woodworking without these tools you do not have much of an appreciation for our craft.
If you like to get off on the right foot I guarantee you that precision measuring tools will earn their keep in a wood working shop.
Last edited by Chris Fournier; 02-15-2013 at 9:03 PM. Reason: Mel pointed out my gaff! Thanks.
[OP]
Guest
Wow. What he said.
Contributor
Think you have a typo ,need to remove the "don't "in front of "eschew" .Or change "eschew" to "use". Had to read it a couple of times. Otherwise no one will know whom to shoot...
Contributor
Stan,
Guess one of the things in your original post that struck me is that you got a Starrett square that wasn't square. I have 6 or 7 of them, all different sizes. I just assumed they were square out of the box because they were Starrett. I'm gonna check them all for square as soon as I figure out how to do that. I haven't read the thread you referenced yet, but will. I am a hobbyiest as I noted, but I hate it when I can't rely on my tools. I try to buy the best I can afford because I want to get the best results I can afford. I have some Grizzly stiff because that is what I could get by the LOML. But I also have some Festool, Veritas, Incra, Jessum, and yes Starrett stuff. Over the years, I have acquired a nice shop full of tools. However, again I just assume the better brand measuring and marking tools were dead on accurate. If that isn't necessarily true, I want to begin to pay attention to that and make sure they get fixed or replaced. I need all the help I can get. Starting with tools that aren't properly calibrated seems like a silly mistake on my part and one I plan to pay much more attention to.
Alan
Contributor
Alan, I hate to say this but Starrett has ruined their reputation. At one time, you bought a Starrett and you didn't have to check it. It was dead nuts..PERIOD. Not anymore. Don't ask me...I don't know...I don't care. I don't buy Starrett anymore, except used, and I check it very carefully before I buy.
IMHO, if you want it to be proper out of the box, every time, buy Mitutoyo. I've yet to be disappointed in a Mitutoyo tool. Starrett still makes some good stuff...and they also make crap...and that's a problem because I'm not a metrology shop nor do I have time to be a quality control department. I also don't have time to research what they still make well and what shows up as basket cases. Bah....buy Mitutoyo if you want it to be reliably good. Let me tell you....labs all across the nation are filled with Mitutoyo calipers, micrometers, etc.
Last edited by John Coloccia; 02-14-2013 at 11:55 PM.
[OP]
Guest
Amen. And you spelled the name right too!
Stan
Member
Amen to all that.
Contributor
What he said. They can be useful to some people, less so to others. Using them isn't an indicator that you will do fine work; not using them isn't an indicator that you can't do fine work.
Your endgrain is like your bellybutton. Yes, I know you have it. No, I don't want to see it.
Guest
How true, the noted stringed instrument makers of the 17th and 18th century would be shocked at the news that they had not accomplished a bit of fine work.
Member
I read through this thread this morning (whew!). There's a lot of good info in it, but the way I see it, there's a fundamental disagreement that is unresolvable.
I am also an engineer, and I do understand that precision measurement is absolutely necessary if you want to make duplicates repeatedly, or you want to make a part that must fit an existing space. Such a situation is something I've been working on for the last several weeks: making 4 nearly identical jewelry boxes. To make the job go faster, I've spent a lot of time on machine set-ups to ensure that I can cut 16 sides of these boxes and the 32 miter joints on their ends by just running them through a properly set up table saw.
However, most of the time I'm making colonial reproductions by the methods originally employed, or as near to the original methods as I can dope out from tool marks on the originals. In this case, one is a whole lot less concerned about the absolute dimensions of a part - one makes a part of the furniture to fit another part on the same piece. When working this way, one generally doesn't care how straight and flat the rails/stiles on a door are, one builds the door and planes it to set flat on the bench and to fit the door opening. In other words, close enough is good enough if one's building a one-off, or several similar pieces, each built as a one-off.
I know woodworkers that never use the "cut it to fit, paint it to match" method - they use cut-lists and precision measurement. And I know woodworkers that don't own any measurement devices beyond a simple wooden straightedge and an old Disston square. They make almost entirely one-off pieces.
Both types are capable of making real works of art.
[OP]
Guest
I thought the term was " cut to match, paint to fit."
The "disagreement" has been stated a dozen different ways. But the primary cause of the so-called "disagreement" is a lack of comprehension of the original premise of the post, namely, that three precision tools can be helpful in ensuring a fellow's layout and measuring tools are in fact reliable at all times, and not just assumed to be reliable. But is has been discouraging to observe that about 1/2 the people disagreeing with the thread are actually objecting to something that was NOT part of the premise, namely the mistaken idea that one must use expensive machinist's tools to do good work. They are in fact objecting to a ridiculous idea that I specifically disclaimed in the originating post.
A lot of people use high-precision tools in all their woodworking. This habit is especially common among people that are required to meet precise dimensions or tolerances as part of the job. In my humble opinion, even where the project doesn't require such precise work, such tools can be very helpful. But are they necessary to do good work? No. Did I suggest that people needed them for working directly on wood? And again, No.
It is glaringly obvious that good work can be done without precision machinists tools. It has been done for thousands of years, and continues today. Since ancient times, competent craftsmen around the world have always taken great pains to ensure their layout and measuring tools where as accurate as they could get them. In fact, since ancient times, the sign of the master craftsman in many civilizations has not been the axe, or saw or plane, but the simple square, the ultimate layout and measuring tool. We are so blessed to live in a time where we can go to Home Teapot and for a measly $12 buy a square that any master craftsman in the Renaissance would have sold one of his children to obtain.
Unlike those dark days, anybody can now buy unimaginably precise tools at, relatively speaking, amazingly little cost. Using them, a craftsman can QUICKLY and EASILY test his workaday tools to ensure they are performing correctly. He doesn't have to guess. He doesn't have to spend time to make approximations. I see owning and using such tools to be a great advantage. Some think it is insignificant. Some are deeply offended. I think I was a fool to begin this thread.
Stan
Guest
Remind me what workaday tools we're supposed to be testing again. We've already determined that we can check a square for square and a straighedge for straight by striking lines and that our own eyes can detect very small deviations, and certainly deviations great enough to actually cause problems with a woodworking project. It takes fifteen seconds, or less, to test a square and a straightedge. To check both would be perhaps an investment of 30 seconds of one's time.
Please articulate, succinctly and specifically, exactly which tools we're supposed to be checking in your opinion.
Member
Actually, I think the sarcastic expression is "beat it to fit, paint it to match"
What I was pointing out is that using the "one-off" method, one doesn't need any precision measuring/layout tools, because virtually nothing is measured. This is partly why a wooden square, even though it may be several tens of thousandths off of true square, is about the only measurement tool one requires to build an extraordinarily complex 18th century piece of furniture.
But - that's only if one builds an 18th century piece of furniture by the original methods. If one uses modern methods using machine tools and cutlists, it'd be quickly apparent why a wooden square isn't going to do the job, at least not conveniently, and a (truly) straightedge is necessary.
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