Veritas Marking Guages

[Raymond Stanley]

Hi All!

Haven't posted in a while...because I have been my attempting to build things! Currently working towards building my first workbench.

I want to get a wheel marking marking guage, and veritas seems to be good but reasonably priced.
I'm having trouble with deciding on exactly which model, so I could use your advise.
1) Graduated vs. non-graduated: do those who have grad use it? those who do not wish they did?
2) micro-adjust vs. non-micro adjust: do those who have it like it? do those who do not have trouble getting the wheel adjusted just right?

Its only about $10 diff spread across all the models, so I'm willing to spend the extra for the features, but I just want to make sure I don't get a feature that is going to hinder working with the tool.

I'll post some pics once my first wood project is done :)

Thanks!
Ray

[Hank Knight]

Raymond,

I've had the basic Veritas wheel guage for a long time. It is a good guage. Last Christmas, my wife gave me a Tite Mark with the extra wheels for marking mortise and tenon joints. It has the micro adjust feature. I use both guages all the time. In my opinion, the micro adjust feature is handy, but not necessary. I never had much trouble setting my Veritas guage without it. I would find the graduated beam feature useless. I set my guage from the work, and seldom, if ever, use a graduated rule for measurement. I find I make more errors using a rule.

My $.02

Hank

[Rob Lee]

Hi Raymond -

I alway recommend the ungraduated gauges, and personally prefer models with no micro-adjust...

Graduations are for rough setting of the gauge only...you should not rely on them for accuracy. Your best bet is to set a gauge from a rule or a reference mark.

Micro-adjust is useful feature - but I have no problems adjusting our standard gauges. People with hand tremors or just dexterity challenges (is it PC to say problems?) find a micro adjust makes tweaking easier.

Cheers -

Rob

[Mike Henderson]

I have two Veritas wheel marking gauges - when you're doing dovetails, it's nice to have two so that you don't have to change the settings - one with the graduated beam and one without. The micro adjust is nice (I use it all the time) but the graduated beam is useless - I never use it. Most of the time I'm setting the gauge from the thickness of a piece of wood, but even if I want to set it from a scale, I don't trust the graduations and use a separate scale.

It's a good gauge. If you buy it, buy a couple of extra wheels at the same time. If you drop the gauge, you can damage the wheel and it's nice to have a replacement on hand (they're pretty cheap).

Mike

[Kent Fitzgerald]

I have the basic version (no graduations, no microadjust) and I'm happy with it. The adjustment is very smooth, with no play or backlash, so I find it easy enough to fine tune the setting with a "calibrated thumbnail."

Just so you know and you're not suprised when you try it out the first time, the "wheel" is not supposed to actually rotate in use.

[Raymond Stanley]

thanks for the great recommendations everybody!