The last item or two in every Anarchist’s Gift Guide are a little more expensive than the others. I feel bad recommending expensive gear, but I’m passionate about these particular selections. This year is no exception.
First is the Brown & Sharpe Dial Caliper. I use dial calipers throughout the day and am picky as hell about them. Many imported calipers are difficult to read, they move roughly and they’re fragile. The Brown & Sharpe has none of these problems.
I’ve had this pair for about 10 years. The dial is easy to read with silver numerals on a black background. The gears move just as smoothly as the day I bought the tool. And they have outlasted all the other brands we’ve had in the shop.
Some hand tool enthusiasts might scoff at a dial caliper, saying it’s a machinist tool. I make no apologies; I love the things. They are invaluable for toolmaking – we have to hit certain specs for the Crucible parts we make here. Plus the tools are great for diagnosing woodworking joinery problems. When I have a tenon or spindle that is too tight, the dial caliper shows me where the problem is. And it can point out how much material I have to remove.
When I’m fitting shelves in dados, the caliper can tell me how many passes I need to take with a smoothing plane to get the part to fit in its dado. And on and on.
Plus, when you have a contest to see who can saw the thinnest slice off the end of a board, the dial caliper can declare the winner.
The calipers come in a hard-shell plastic case. The case isn’t the best (the locking mechanism is kinda crappy), but if you keep the tool safe in its case when not in use, it should last your entire woodworking career.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Thanks to Thomas Lie-Nielsen for introducing me to these excellent dial calipers.
I use these often. I make a lot of bentwood boxes, and the difference between .065 and .073 is a lot of broken parts. I wouldn’t work without one of these.
For most furniture building, I don’t care if a part is 13/16, 7/8, or 15/16. Whatever looks best is best. But if a dimension is critical, it pats to be particular.
I also regularly use my dial (Preisser) or digital (Starrett) calipers when hand tool woodworking.
For example, I’m currently hand planing the lumber to produce the requisite number of laminates (each at around 89″ x 4.5″ x 2″) to make up a workbench top, and in the final steps of planing them to thickness, I will get out the calipers and check the edges all the way round. In this I aim for an edge deviation from perfectly coplanar not larger than +/- 0,1 mm ≈ 0,004 thou, i.e. a total maximum deviation of 0.008 thou, although in all honesty I’m mostly hitting an aggregate deviation of 0.010 to 0.012 thou.
I dare say that this is an exaggerated level of precision for woodworking in general, but I hope that by going over the top (ha!) and spending some more effort on this, I will save myself a corresponding amount of trouble when, in an upcoming step, I will finess the fit of each pair of surfaces before glue-up?!
Mattias
Yes, the plastic case that comes with these caliper is frustrating but, the notes with this caliper include a part number for a mahogany case. You can search for the part number wherever you shop.
For the convenience of metric and imperial measurements in one package, digital calipers are surprisingly useful. Since acquiring the digital Wixey calipers, I don’t use my dial calipers very much:
https://www.amazon.com/Wixey-WR100-Digital-Calipers-Fractions/dp/B001PTGBR6
When I use imperial units, I find a fractional display useful. For imperial units the Wixey display shows decimal and fractional measurements. Some dial calipers also have decimal and fractional scales for imperial measurements.
As a bonus, these Wixey calipers are much cheaper than the highest quality dial calipers. I have no evidence that these Wixey calipers are less accurate than the more expensive dial calipers. Even if they are somewhat less accurate, however, mine seem more precise than they need to be for woodworking.
P.S. In case the readers here exclusively use imperial units, I apologize for my repeated reference to related metric tools. Since about 95% of the world’s population uses metric measurements, I hope that these alternatives are useful to at least some readers.
Nothing ups your cabinetmaking game like even a pair of vernier calipers. They are by far the most consistently used tool in my shop. I have a little Starrett pair.
Indispensable measuring tool for me. I use mine almost as often as my measuring tape, and it excels at precisely measuring the depth of a mortice thanks to its depth bar. Great suggestion.
I use one for M&Ts, and also when building things like Czeckedge kits, he gives you measurements for turning the tenon on handles for marking knives and birdcage awls etc. Super easy with dial calipers.
Out of stock on the L-N site. Hard to know if that’s due to the fact that L-N is working with a skeleton crew thanks to C19 or if the “Schwarz Effect” has stuck again.
Pretty much everything of LNs has been out of stock for months on their site and their resellers’ sites. I’ve even seen used LN tools sell for more than new on used tool guy sites since you can’t get them.
I use my calipers all the time. I’m an engineer by trade, so that’s not surprising. But I’d like to point out – there is a difference between being within .005 on 2-3/8ths, and having a mortise match the tenon to within .005 or so. The former is probably unimportant, the latter much more so. Calipers can be useful in both cases, just don’t overuse them.