How to Make A Bevel Gauge

hey y'all i'm james wright and welcome to my shop today we are making a bevel gauge ooh i've actually never made one of these before let's dive in and have some fun [Music] so we have the beam and all the brass hardware to make a bevel gauge let's have a little bit of fun here for the main body of this one i'm going to use some wall nut and i had this chunk left over that would work out really really well give it a quarter sawn section or close to quarter swan so i'm going to start by planing one side flat using that as a reference and then squaring up another side to it and that way i have my reference face and reference edge now i need to figure out how wide is this thing going to be and thankfully i've got these little brass pieces that come with it and so i need it to be about the same width of these i mean i can always file these down to the shape as we'll be doing later but i need to figure out then how thick does it also need to be so i'm going to put these together and space them out and then measure the thickness and the width that i want on the beam and then i can mark that out on this block of wood and so with a marking gauge we can mark out both the thickness and the width and then for length i'm just going to set the blocks on there set the beam on there and see yeah it's going to be about this long there's nothing specific about the length it just has to be about the right length then we can start ripping this thing down so we're going to rip it down to the width of it first accumulate the thickness of it first and then we can cut it to the length and then we can rip it one more time into the the thickness or the width whichever one we didn't do but before we get on to that i'm going to smooth it down this will allow me to get a nice clean mark on the other direction of it and so for the thickness i want it to be the same width or the same thickness whichever one of those two you want to choose as the beam so we can put a mark on there and then slice it down keep it a little ways away from that line and then we can plane it right back to that marking gauge line on there so now we want to inset these brass pieces on to either end and so i'm marking off how far they need to come in everything on this is is much bigger than it needs to be and that is that's perfectly fine i can set a marking gauge to the thickness of the brass and then mark in so that this will inset a little bit and i want to be sticking out a little bit proud because i'm going to be filing off the brass to match the wood and so just like cutting in a tiny little rabbit i'm going to use the dovetail saw and cut in a tiny little rabbit march down the sides right on the lines and then chop in to cut out the the shoulder of this or i guess it could be the cheek depending upon which way you hold the board the nice thing with a dovetail saw is you can cut cross grain just as well as you can cut rip grain because it's a a pretty straightforward surface a lot of people actually like to have a hybrid cut on their dovetail saw to make the two little easier we can file it out make sure it's nice and smooth we want to have a little bit of roughness in there for the epoxy to hold on to but just enough so that it works out well we're going to be mixing up a little bit of epoxy spread it on the surface put more than you want we want to squeeze out all of the edges so that when it squeezes out we can plane it all back nice and flush and we get a good fit on there and then to hold these in place we're going to use some hand screw clamps and yeah this gets actually kind of sloppy how do you hold them in there and then knock them back and forth and you want to tap it around until it gets all in place and then you get one end just in place and then the other end you have to get it in place and then you end up knocking out the first end and you end up going back and forth a few times but it's a nice thing with epoxy you have some open time i was using i think it was 30 minute epoxy on these after you give it time to cure you can come back and start filing it off and this one i made it just a little bit wider the brass pieces are a little larger than need to be and so i can file those back to the wood and then get a nice clean surface on here i wanted my beam to be the same width as the the actual beam i wanted the whole body to be the same width as the beam or the beam to be the same width of the body either way you want to look at it so the brasses are a good bit larger to need to be shape them back to match the wood and then smooth them out and file them off i had a little bit of epoxy come through and so just a light little tap work that off there on the rounded end i'm going to work the in the wood down with a rasp and get it close to the brass pieces and then i'm going to come in with a file and that will allow me to then do both at the same time i don't like to use my nice wooden rasps on metal but using a metal rasp on wood actually works perfectly fine so on these finished surfaces i want to actually shine them up and make them pretty so i'm going to be using a heavy file to come in and take them down to the same thickness of the wood and then i'm going to come in with a very very clean file and give them all the same direction scratches but before i do the the final details on that we still have some more work to do on the main body i'm going to use this pencil on a couple thicknesses of actually 55 irons and so that will lift it up to the right point i'll mark one side of the cut and then flip the block over and mark the other side of the cut now i need to find the saw that has the right fit for it and i want to be something that slides in nicely but doesn't slide in too easily and so i have different saws with different sets in them and so i'm trying to find one where it slides in relatively well but it's not perfectly tight and so i found one that was really really close to what i wanted it was a tiny bit tighter but i was able to to come in with some sandpaper and just widen it out just a hair after that now we can cut this down so we have those lines and i'm going to be very very careful to get myself a nice straight cut down as we're going to be flipping it from side to side each time until we get it down to the depth and the bottom of this will actually be angled to match the beam angle and so this can slide all the way down to the end and so it's starting to look like the tool we want it to be up here on the top we need to drill a hole through the square of one and into the square of the other i'm going to come halfway from one side turn around and come halfway from the other and this will allow the bolt to go through it has a carriage head that will fit into the square socket on one of the two sides so you can see the square his carriage head comes in and then the nut can turn on and that's what will actually allow it to clamp down on the surface a really simple old design and works really really well so for all the final details on it i'm going to break out some 400 grit sandpaper and this will give me nice clean scratches on all the surfaces i want to make sure it comes down to the wood i ended up leaving the faces of the brass ever so slightly proud of the wood i kind of liked that little bit of feel though i know a lot of people are going to want to make them perfectly smooth all the way across i just kind of i was going to take the brass down a little bit farther and thought you know i kind of like the look of it and it's a little easier to do i also want to make sure my scratches on the brass are all running the same direction so i get that brushed feel so i'm going to use that on the bench top and then run the block over it so that all of these scratches on the brass are running in the same direction and at this point it's just detailing and you can do this forever the detailing steps are one of those things that are never done at that certain point you have to say this is good enough and we can move on to the homemade boiled linseed oil ooh i love how that walnut comes out just dip the whole thing in let it soak in as much as it wants wipe it off and i'm going to just let the wood soak up as much at once until it's fully soaked off wipe off the excess and apply paste wax and then it's put together slide the beam in turn the nut down and your bevel gauge is done it's one of those things it's a really rather quick simple project and it's a lot of fun you can never have enough of these in your shop it's it's a project that you could do over and over again and each time get a little bit better at it and it's a relatively affordable kit so you could do it as many times as you want make them christmas gifts and hand them out lots of fun so there you have it a bevel gauge this is one of those tools that you can never have enough of i have probably 15 of them in the shop and i've had projects where they've all been used and set up and basically it's a square that you can set to any angle and so anytime you're doing a compound angle you have a square with one and then you have a bevel with the other or if you have a double compound you have two of bevels that are at different angles or if you have a triple compound you have three bevels at different angles so they're all measuring different things and you can have a lot of fun with these they're just a really useful tool that i use all the time and it's nice to have a few more of them now this is actually made from a kit from tools i'll leave a link to that down below it's just a nice simple kit with the pieces you need to make a really nice efficient bevel gauge and voila uh this is really nice i like this thing and i might have to make a couple more because well you can never have enough bevel gauges so i'd love to hear your thoughts on this what or what things would you do differently what are some suggestions ideas comments on this let me know those down below that does help out the channel so thank you for that anytime you hit comment down below or you hit like share subscribe those things do help us and they get us informed more people and they help the channel to grow so thank you that means more than i can say also if you want to take it one step farther there are a bunch of people who are scrolling over here on the side they are the patrons on patreon they're the ones who are literally keeping us going we are completely sponsored by you the viewers and through patreon and clicking the little join button down below and becoming a member here on youtube you can help us out and keep us going we do have special perks for both and that really does mean a lot so thank you if you'd like to find out more about patreon and what we offer there are links down below or you can click the little join button and become a member here on youtube i think that'll do it for now and until next time have a wonderful day there's a difference between a bevel gauge and a level gauge a bevel gauge finds angles a level gauge isn't a tool

Channel: Wood By Wright How To

Views: 11,761

Keywords: Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, woodworking, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, bevel gauge, how to make, how to make a bevel gauge, square, squair, brass walnut, bevel gauge kit, tool kit, quick woodworking projects, woodworking gifts

Id: rm-rAbFHp-g

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022