On www.thewoodworkingchannel.com they toured the woodworking convention; there Scott Phillips highlighted some products at the booth for Beal Tool Company.
In addition to the handy wood threading tools they are known for, their latest offering seems to be a sure fire winner.
It’s a smallish cube, a tad less than 2″ per edge. It has magnetic feet and a two place digital readout of the angle it’s sitting on.
In use, you set it on the TS, hit the “Zero” button, then stick it to the raised TS blade. It will display the angle of the blade to two decimal places.
Depending on how far from $100.00 it’s priced at, it looks like a keeper.
A trip over to the Beal Tool Company website reveals nothing about the item.
Arlington, Texas (The dash in Dallas-Fort Worth)
Practice…’till you can do it right the first time.
Practice…’till you can do it right the first time.
Replies
Lee Valley sells one of those. See here.
http://tinyurl.com/fyyrf
Beall sells a pendulum style mechanical one also, I thought he was talking about an electronic digital one.
Since the house is on fire let us warm ourselves. ~Italian Proverb
Couldn't open your link but look at ...
http://wixey.com/anglegauge/index.html
This looks like it would be really useful on miter saws - notoriously poor settings on most.Rennie
A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward. Frank Lloyd Wright
Rennie,You just gave me an additional nudge in the buying direction.(not that I needed one)
I don't know if you remember but Bismeyer had a gizmo like that way back and never really worked. This one is much cheaper I will buy it and report.C.
Gadgets, gadgets. These things look so tempting. Someone is always designing something that appeals to our obsession with gadgets.
But 0.1 degree accuracy? C'mon. That's not anywhere near good enough for a table saw blade angle or a jointer fence.
Besides, the standard machine shop "self referencing" method is easily ten times as accurate and requires only a few pieces of scrap stock to set up your equipment.
The technique is the same as checking the trueness of a square by holding it against a reference edge of a board. scribing a line along its blade on the face of the board, rotating it 180 degrees against the reference edge and observing how the blade lines up with the line. That magnifies any out-of-square error by a factor of 2. And the eye is especially sensitive to the misalingment.
For a table saw blade set up, joint the edge of a 4 foot long 1 x 3 piece of lumber. Cut it into 2 pieces 2 feet long.
Set the blade angle as carefully as you can, by whatever squaring method you normally use. Raise the blade to full height. Using your crosscut sled, set the two pieces on edge, jointed edges down on the bed of the sled, tightly against each other against the rear fence as usual, face of the 2 board "stack" toward the blade and crosscut both at once. Shut off the saw.
Assuming you cut with the work on the left side of the sled, rotate the forward 1x3 clockwise, keeping its jointed reference edge down on the sled, so that the two cut edges face each other. Any deviation of the blade from 90 degrees will be exagerated by a factor of 2 at the meeting of the cut edges.
The eye is extremely sensitive to such misalignment and can easily see a deviation of a tiny fraction of a degree. Adjust the blade until the cut edges do not meet at either the top or bottom, but seem to meet all along the 2-1/2-3" cut edge. The blade will then be set at 90 degrees to the saw table to a degree of precision beyond anything that woodworking could require.
A similar technique works for the jointer. Set the fence as accurately as possible. Joint one face of a 4x4. Don't hold the piece agaisnt the fence for that first jointing pass. Call that jointed face the reference face.
Rotate the piece 90 degrees about its longitudinal axis, so that the reference face is toward the fence. Holding the reference face firmly against the fence, joint the second face. Rotate 90 degrees again, hold firm, joint the 3rd face. Rotate again, hold firm, joint the 4th face.
Rotate again. The reference face will be down against the jointer tables, the 4th face will face the fence. Any deviation of the fence from 90 degrees to the tables will be magnified by a factor of four as indicated by any angle (acute or obtuse) between the 4th face and the fence. Reset the fence as necessary and repeat until there is no angle between the 4th face and the fence.
After you have your equipment aligned, go buy the digital device. As we all know, the one who dies with the most toys, wins.
Rich
Take a look at this.
http://www.woodcraft.com/family.aspx?familyid=5894
Thanks for the link.
As I remember it (yeah, right) the item briefly demo'd by Mr. Beal had a two place decimal readout. I know it's splitting hairs but, I always try to research the competition before making a purchase.Arlington, Texas (The dash in Dallas-Fort Worth)
Practice...'till you can do it right the first time.
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