Tools We Love: Saddle Square
George VondriskaDescription
George Vondriska talks about why he likes using a saddle square on his woodworking projects that require wrapping guidelines around a corner. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is than using a conventional square!
I'm working on a stool here and laying out the mortis locations that I need to have for the stool. So what I do I'm just using a story stick to get those more dislocations on this face. Of course, what I need is to transfer those marks across this face. Also onto this face. Here's the easiest way in the whole wide world to make that happen. And that is using a saddle square. This is very cool. It captures across the corner and it's accurately made so that the sides are perfectly perpendicular to each other. This edge is a nice straight line. So as a result what it allows me to do is align with this pencil mark that I just made. Make a line, hold it in that same position, strike down the adjacent face. It's much easier than trying to use a conventional square and do the same task. Here we go. You'll find saddle squares at woodworking specialty stores. It's not something you're going to find in a home center. It's definitely a layout tool that is worth adding to your collection so that when you need to wrap lines around a corner like I did here you can do it more accurately and a whole lot more easily than you can with a conventional square.
Hi George, Love your site. The short commercials are tolerable, but with premium membership those 20-30 second commercials are pretty cumbersome.
Good start on using the saddle square, George, but if you want ACCURATE layout, use your marking knife with the saddle square. Supplement your pencil marks on your story pole with a knife tick on the edge. Use this tick mark to align with your work pieces using the saddle square. Now all of your pieces will have dead-on alignment of their layout marks. I have this saddle square and love it!
I have a saddle square from Bridge City Tool Works, which has the advantage of folding in the middle, which allows marking lines on a piece where the two sides are not 90 degrees. Very useful tool.
I use the center-finding head from my Starrett rules. It works quite well, and I can save some cash because of it's dual use capability.
I've had one for years and it's useful enough to me that I keep it in the pocket of my apron along with a utility knife and not much else.
Thanks George. I have never gone to the expense of purchasing one of these since I have a "center finder" attachment for one of my combination squares. When I replaced the square, I kept the attachment to use for layout just as you showed. Dan