I am about to start making cabinets. I know how big a problem I can create by not building things square. I also know that sides of cabinets neeed to be parallel.
Festool makes an Angle Unit that will even attach to my fences. It costs $65 and I have no idea how accurate it is for how long. I have a better fence on order with Bob which may be very accurate but I am betting it will have to be calibrated on occasion.
I know my Festool table and Angle Guide can be made very accurate. However, I am aware that there is some wobble in many fences, even between the time the angle is set on the gauge and things get locked down. A popular solution seems to be making a jig out of some stable material (like MDF or several pieces of carefully finished glued up wood) that can be used to lock things in square. But then, how do I make sure that my jig is square, when the reason I am building it is, I may not have a dead on way to assure something is square.
I have a sliding square, which sems to wable. I have multiple metal builders squares, but I doubt those things are all that accurate. I have an old 6" Engineer's square which should be very accurate but is to short and the blade is to thin to line up on.
Maybe I just need a larger enginer's square but it will only check for square. I wonder about other angles. Can I assume that once I calibrate a fence gauge for square that the rest of the settings on those little dials will be dead on?
How much help would a Machinist's Protractor or Starret's Digital solution be? Am I just looking at this problem from to many angles?
http://www.woodcraft.com/family.aspx?familyid=4438
http://www.amazon.com/Starrett-505A-.../dp/B0000DCBLW