Marking Gauge

One very important tool for woodworking is a marking gauge.  It allows you to mark a knife line on a board at a consistant distance from the edge of the board.  It turns out that all of the marking gauges commercially sold kind of suck.  It is very important that once you set the distance that it not change.  Obviously the NBSS solution to this problem is make our own.  Here's mine:

It was pretty simple to make.  We made a block out of maple for the fence.  We drilled holes in the fence for the arm and key.  Then we turned a dowel out of maple for the arm to fit the hole and flattened a portion of it with our hand planes.  Next we cut a little pad out of maple to fit against the arm and chiseled out the top of the hole for the pad to sit in.  Then we inserted the key, which pushes on the pad and locks the whole thing together.  The hardest part was making the hole for the knife.  It is very important that the knife is parallel to the fence.  So, we set the arm so where we wanted the hole to be was against the fence, then used the chisel to pare the inside of the hole so it was parallel to the fence.  We also had to angle the other side of the hole, so that when we made and fit an angled wedge it would lock tight when pressed against the knife in the hole, holding the knife in place.  The hole width was determined by the size of our homemade knives, which were made out of jigsaw blades that we ground the teeth off of, flattened the back of and ground a cutting angle on.  It was a good days work for a very important and useful tool.