inventing...

My new dovetail templates manufactured by Veritas

When I was a kid, I subscribed to Popular Science and imagined that when I grew up, I would become an inventor. With the arrival of the UPS truck, up our icy drive yesterday, I became one. When I wanted my kids at school to cut dovetails by hand, I needed simple dovetail marking templates, and chose to make them in the feminine form rather than the traditional masculine manner. I formed the negative shape of the pin and tail, rather than the positive one, in reverse of all the other dovetail templates on the market.

What I discovered in its use was a template that allowed easier measuring and marking.  Instead of spending so much time with tape measure and ruler laying out the sizes of the pins and tails, a central measured mark, visible through the opening of the template will suffice. The width of the pins and tails can be easily varied through the use of the built in scale by moving the template in precise measure to one side or the other of the marked line, and as a special bonus, the template itself serves as a square, removing the need for that one tool. This sweet device does it all. No need to set it down and reach for something else. As you can guess, I'm pretty excited about this. I can imagine these tools being in use throughout the world at some point in time, helping craftsmen to take greater pleasure in their work.

Like most tools that can do more than one thing, this one takes explanation. Manufactured by Lee Valley/Veritas Tools, these are the very first prototypes delivered to see that they've achieved what I had in mind. I will write instructions for their use.

I have also been busy with sketchup, drawing the boxes for the first three chapters of the new book.

Make, fix and create.