[mpsensfan1]

Not temperature mind you, but for our common measuring tools.

I had been reading with interest on the Garage Woodworks site about how to find how square our squares are whereby Brian had some great ideas for calculating if what we own is true to 90 degrees or not.

Using his suggestions I gathered up the various squares I own (like framing, speed, drywall, tri, etc.) and ran them through the tests. Grant you, I don't have fine crafted ones, more or less your local big box store styles so I wasn't expecting great accuracy with them.

In addition to Brian's test suggestions, I also compared them using a digital angle level and a mini digital protractor.

To my surprise the whole lot were either 90 degrees dead on, or close enough to be fine for short length boards (under 4 feet). The worst case scenario was the mid/low end quality framing square that came out at 89.8 degrees at the uppermost part of the arm, which can be tweaked using a punch as needed.

Using suggestions as found on this site or in it's forum has allowed me to fine tune mid-range equipment to be the best it can be thereby getting the most from them. If they get the job done, great, if not then I will know what to upgrade and why.

I am neither a commercial or pro-woodworker, mainly just doing it for pleasure and a hobby, so "exacting" isn't critical to me as it may be to someone working on commission. However, it is nice to get great tips from the members here so I can get the most from the equipment I do have.

It was worth seeing just how square the squares are!

The next test I think will be the measuring tapes, to see if they are consistent to each other and against a fixed ruler.

Cheers, Mike

[rwrayburn]

I concur. Brian's videos and this forum have made a huge contribution to the accuracy of my tools and to how I think about accuracy.

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to acquire a wide drum sander, the Delta 16-32 a couple of years ago at a REALLY good price. The previous owner, a neighbor, was exiting his hobby for health reasons and I bought several of his machines including this one. He said he didn't use it because it "had problems". I did some preliminary adjustments and reached satisfactory performance.
As long as I never put anything wider than the bed through it, I was satisfied with the output. If I put a wider panel through it to sand one half of it and then rotated it to put the other edge (but the same side) through it, I would get a "ridge in the panel that required hand sanding or scraping because the bed wasn't dead flat. When I looked at Delta's manual for adjusting it, the procedure was to set a block of wood on the frame so that it "barely touches" the bottom of the bed and move it around to each of the adjusting screws and turn the screws to set the bed to "barely touch" each of the points, iteratively adjusting the screws until accuracy was achieved. Accuracy was defined as "within 1/64 inch.

Reflecting on Brian's gospel, I contrived a mod of his table saw alignment fixture (a dial indicator screwed to a block of wood) and used that instead.

The results were simply astonishing. In a half hour the bed was dead on and a dial caliper proved no camber on wide pieces and identical measurements at the edges.

Would never have occurred to me to take that approach without Brian's videos.

[mpsensfan1]

RWR - glad to hear that you were able to calibrate your sander. A good find, good price and a bit of "elbow grease" and it is where it needs to be. You have hit the nail on the head, that being taking the time to tweak things out. How many folks give up on their equipment because it is not performing up to par? When all it requires is a simple fix!

The wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I have picked up from Brian's site and forum has been worth it's weight in gold in the short time I have been here and has allowed for me to maximize the performance of what my tools can do. What I thought was good, is now near perfect by the tool's limitations or at worst, an understanding of the shortfall and what might need to be done via a complimentary tool to rectify a situation.

The dial indicator for wood working applications alone has done wonders in diagnosing the does/does not capabilities of my collection of tools and I would consider this piece of equipment a shop -must have- thanks to Brian's information on how to use it. Something I would not have thought of doing before, rather just counting on milled tolerances of other measuring gauges to get it "in the ball park".

Cost effective and very accurate when micro-adjustments are called for, definitely worth purchasing one.

Sharing that information here amoungst ourselves and learning from "field testing" by like interested persons as the forum becomes more active over time will benefit novice to expert alike. Enjoy your sander!

Cheers, Mike