When inspecting the thicknesses of my plates, over the years I’ve encounter a lot of tool nomenclature to measure or mark large plates, for instance:
- Marking caliper
- Sacconi compass
- Thicknessing (or thickness) gauge
- Graduation (or graduating) marking
- Caliper gage
- Graduation punch
- …
Aamof (as the kids say), there’s two tasks here: 1. inspecting the depths; and 2. marking (with a pencil), regions “requiring attention” whilst carving.
So let’s delve into this.
We’ll start by this quote by Brutus (in the “Rome” TV series by HBO): “you can call a cat a fish, but, if you throw it on water, it won’t swim”. Nice.
Point is, regardless of its naming, you want to control the depths of your carvings.
This is one basic model for measuring thicknesses:
It has a large mouth (or throat), so you can measure your plates. I’ve seen a lot of DIY tools in the internets, modifying other tools so it becomes a thicknessing gauge, however, this post is not about this today.
You could go ‘old style’ and work on a tool that does that, like:
Or even something like this Veritas model:
Imagine if you could put your hands on this beauty here: a Waltham no. 2 W. Reilly’s Patent violin makers’ caliper gage.
Well, I digress, let’s go back to reality.
This model, for instance, resembles an F-Clamp and it uses a ruler (internally) to tell you the thickness of the piece:
You could use a wedge to tell you the depth as well:
In this case, you set your caliper at 5mm and then use the graduated wedge to ‘find’ your thickness.
And I have found this one on the internets that looks and works quite neat:
It has a little ruler to inform the depth.
Sacconi Compass
Now, to mark special regions worth your attention, you could work with something like this (the source is from Maestronet, user janito):
I (uppercase I) would make a hole in that end, even a very small one, this model is asking for a splitting…
Davide Sora has presented his own model, consisting of a large mouth and a pencil:
There’s this model that if you could attach a pencil on the end of the tool, so it marks your depths accordingly:
At this point, he haven’t touched on any “graduation punch” mechanism, that serves to other equally important tasks in violin making, but that’s the subject of another post, I believe.
Epilogue
Well, I have of course not exhausted this topic as always. There’s a lot of things to think about measuring thicknesses and so on. But I believer there’s good food for thought yet again.