Miscellaneous blathering
Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>I finally put the Stanley trammel points I picked up for free (other than getting soaking wet, as I was scrounging a metal pile at an estate sale in the rain) a year or so ago. I needed to test a 2 foot by 4 foot opening for square, and clamping them on a stick allowed me to check quickly and more accurately than I could have with a tape. Neat tools (I guess plural is correct, although one trammel point alone wouldn't be much use).
Some recent wandering on the county library's web catalog yielded a 1937 Popular Science "Cyclopedia" for the shop, and there, in the midst of articles about converting a vacuum cleaner motor for shop use and building some hideously ugly furniture for the living room, is a little article about building thumb planes for instrument-making and ship-model-building. The author uses somewhat Krenovian methods to build the plane body in two halves. I'm reluctant to post the article due to copyright laws, but will be happy to provide more descriptive information to those who ping me offline.