About 12-15 years ago, I met a man on a plane who noticed I was reading a woodworking magazine and we struck up a conversation. Short story shorter, he ended up surprising me by sending a few tools that he was no longer using. Among these was this marking gauge labelled "Worth", a name I didn't and still don't know anything about. EDIT - an internet search came up with a thread on a "Garage Journal" forum where people identified Worth as being a brand from Bigelow and Douse Hardware of Boston, MA. They further noted that the Worth tools were probably manufactured by Peck, Stow and Wilcox (Pexto) for the hardware store.
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| The Worth marking gauge |
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| It had a wooden screw to clamp the beam in place, approx 3/8" x 10 tpi |
Like many similar gauges, the wooden screw had become loose as the wood fibers were worn away. Also, the mortise hole in the fence wasn't a great fit for the beam, so this gauge has been sitting in a drawer for a long time.
At first, I addressed the beam looseness problem by putting some blue masking tape on the beam to get a tighter fit in the fence. Obviously not a long-term solution. Then I thought about putting a threaded insert in the screw hole and using a metal thumb screw.
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| Brass threaded insert |
It turned out that the brass insert was still a little loose in the hole, so I decided that I'd make a new fence. If I was making a marking gauge from scratch, I'd mortise the fence first and then plane the beam to fit just right. For this one, I wanted to use the Worth's beam, both for nostalgic reasons and because I like the scale printed on one side. It was a little tricky to make the mortise just the right size to fit the existing beam. I ended up using a caliper to measure the beam's width, locked the caliper at that measurement, then stabbed the inner diameter measuring fingers of the caliper on the new fence to mark for the mortise walls.
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| Mortise chopped and upper and lower facets shaped for the curved top and bottom surfaces of the beam |
At first, the fit seemed a little too loose, but after some shellac it fit very well. Next, I bored a hole through the top, down to the mortise. I had shaped and placed a stick in the mortise so that I wouldn't blow out the mortise's top wall. The threaded insert went in that hole.
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| You can see the insert within the mortise |
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| I used a leather punch to make this plastic "coin" (?) so that the thumb screw would not damage the top of the beam |
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| I get a good solid grip of the beam when the thumb screw is tightened |
Then the screw was cut down to length. To make the thumb screw more comfortable, I inset the "thumb hold" part of the screw into two small pieces of walnut that were carved out to fit the thumb hold and then glued together. It was then shaped to make a much more comfortable grip and look a bit more like the original.
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| The new thumb screw next to the original |
After shaping the fence for comfort, I gave the parts a few coats of shellac, then waxed all but the bottom of the beam - that's what gets pressed against the lower mortise wall when the screw is tightened and I don't want that to be slippery.
So I now have a nicely working marking gauge. It looks a little funny being two-toned, but I got to preserve some of the gift I was given and give it new life.
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| Glamour shot #1 |
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| Glamour shot #2 |
BTW, I changed one thing in my fence from the original: there is more meat below the mortise in the walnut fence. I like having that extra bearing surface when using a marking gauge. The original had less than 5/8" of bearing surface to reference against a workpiece.
