The miracle of Langdon Acme miter boxes
Bill Houghton, cold today, Sebastopol, CA
>I've been fitting the molding into our "square? What's square?" old house, with a lot of oddball angles, spaces that aren't quite the length they measure due to wall irregularities*, etc. Since the lumberyard from which the molding comes is a good half hour away, and of course since molding is not cheap, I've been singing hosannas about the Langdon Acme miter box. I can consistently trim a saw-kerf's length off the crown molding, and today, I've been able to adjust an already cut piece of molding (fortunately a gnat's hair long when I started adjusting it) by two degrees without altering its length significantly. Amazing; all my previous miter boxes were incapable of holding the saw that effectively. No wonder the old guys were willing to pay such high prices for them.
*and, in some cases, of course, carpenter incompetence.