Marking Gauge

[John Schreiber]

I had hoped to post this as a SU document also, but I guess I need to learn a thing or two about being efficient with file sizes. The *.skb for this little drawing is 321 Kb.

Anyway, perhaps because I'm clumsy, I have a hard time getting a clean line when using a marking gauge. I thought something like this might work well.

The body is 4" by 1" by 1 1/2", and it has a 1/4" by 1/4" notch cut out of the bottom to register against the workpiece. The rod which holds the scratch point can be rotated so that the point is more or less aggressive as it contacts the wood. The wedge works at 90* to the direction of travel of the rod so that tightening the rod in place shouldn't move the rod out of adjustment.

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So is this a worthwhile idea or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[patrick anderson]

looks cool to me mate....as for SU file sizes be sure to purge your file.

[Dave Richards]

Patrick is correct. Purge the File both under Window>Model Info>Statistics and under the flyout menu in the Materials browser.

The thing that contributes to file size the most is the number of faces in the curves. You got a lot of them but for this model that's probably not so bad. Many times you can make acceptable curved surfaces with fewer faces. This would be important if you were to have a lot of curved surfaces. In this case I wouldn't worry about it.

By the way, the SKB file is the backup that SU creates during autosave and when you save the file. SU would be able to revert to the last saved version in the event of a crash. If you don't have any crashes, you don't need the SKBs and can delete them. The SKP file on the other hand is the file you want to keep.

[John Schreiber]

Here's another try at the design. I'm finding that taking a 2nd cut at something I've already done is a great learning tool in Sketch Up. Of course, I find that to be true with real wood too, so I don't know why it should surprise me.

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A new JPEG with small changes.

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The SKP file. Still 160 K. Zipped here to make it fit. I'll play with making fewer sections in the curves. I'm sure that when I do a curve on a curve, there is a multiplying effect which eats up memory.


Please let me know how I could be doing SU better.

[Dave Richards]

John, I looked at your model and I only found one thing that was a bit odd. There was a face in the mortise above the beamwhere the top of the knife blade would fit when retracted. When orbiting in close I noticed the the flicker indicative of "Z fighting", two planes fighting for the same space.

I really don't think 160K for that model is too bad. You could reduce the number of segments in the arcs which would reduce the number of faces and thus the file size but since the model is something you would view at close range, I wouldn't do that.

Another thing you could do if the fence was symmetrical in either the X or y directions is split it in half down the centerline. Then copy the component of the half, mirror the copy and bring the two halves together. Hide the seam by using the Eraser tool with Shift to hide the lines. That would cut in half the number of lines and faces in the fence.

Your fence isn't symmetrical so it doesn't work as well but you could do it with the ends of the fence. I did that and got the file size down to 117K. (120K disk size.)

Again, I don't think it's such a big deal for this model but it is good to be thinking that way for larger models.

Good work, John.