26VIDEO Pencil & Marking Tools

In this video, I want to talk to you about marking tools

You don't really don't need anything fancy. You know, as a beginning woodworker, all you need is one of these. A pencil does the job

Really, any kind of pencil is going to work for the kinds of basic projects that you're going to be learning

I do keep a crank pencil sharpener here in the shop, so I can keep this, you know, my pencils really sharp

And I do use these wooden pencils, too. If you're going to set out and buy some pencils for your shop

get something a little harder than the regular HB. This is an H

so a little bit harder than HB, just one notch up. You can get 2H and 4H. 2H is okay

4H is a bit hard. It doesn't really mark quite as darkly as I'd like to, but

this, with the pencil sharpener, that's handy. You can make marks quite easily, and this is going to serve you very well

Just marking with the square like this. That's a nice mark. It's not too dark

but you can see it, too. Now, when people think of woodworking

you might think of something like this, carpenter's pencil. Completely different shape, you know, it's flat, much coarser lead

I do not use these in my woodworking shop when I'm building furniture or, you know, interior woodworking

This is a coarse tool. This would be for marking, you know, studs and framing members if you're actually building a building. That's where something like this shines. The stout lead

lasts a whole lot longer than this. You know, fine little lead on the tip. There's just a lot more lead here on the carpenter's pencil, and

that's why you want to use it for the coarse work, but I don't actually use it much in the shop here

One thing I do use a lot is this mechanical pencil. This is

pretty much like a regular pencil, but a little more precise, and you can keep your sharpener in your tool pouch, so it's never very far away. If you look here

there's two different holes. If I extend the lead, and I stick it in here, and then I push it down, that extends enough lead

that when I put it in the sharpener, and I start turning it to sharpen it, it's going to bring it to a point

Okay, that's what we've got here. It's to a point. That's pretty well all I ever use

It's what you'd want to use for woodworking use too, but this other hole, it lets the lead stick out a little bit less

far. It's a little bit closer in. I don't know if you can notice the difference from before

but if I were to sharpen this for dull, and I were to sharpen it now, it wouldn't sharpen it to a pointy point. It would be kind of a blunt point

which is not really a whole lot of use for us, for our purposes

Another thing I like to use, you may have one of these around the house

a utility knife is an excellent tool for very precisely marking things. There will come a time in your woodworking career

where you need to be making a precise mark, now within several thousandths of an inch of

exactly where it should be. It has to be quite close, and when you're dealing with something like that

a pencil line can actually be too wide. Don't panic. Don't get upset. This isn't anything you need to do now, but in the future

sometimes you're going to want to make a mark just like that. One nice thing about doing it this way, rather than the pencil, is that there's no

need to resharpen anything. You just make your little slit, and you know if you're using a power saw, like a miter saw

sometimes called a chop saw, it's entirely possible to be able to split

that little mark in half, so you're on the waist half of the mark. So when you want extreme precision

a knife is the way to go. Now this knife, like a lot of them, has

segmented blade, so when the tip gets dull, you can simply break off a chunk, and you've got another fresh segment of blade with a fresh tip. Now to do that

what you want to do is you want to extend the blade so that

the little mark is just past the point where it's being supported in the body of the knife

Now you want to press this down hard enough that it breaks off

but you want to do it with the little slit facing down. I could try to do it like this

but what happens is you have to push quite a bit harder, and because you're pushing down on the little

indentation, or perforation if you call it, it doesn't break as easily as

if you have that facing down. So if I press like this, I'm gonna have to press quite hard to get it to break, and

that bit can fly around because of the pressure. But if I simply turn it over so that the mark is on the bottom, and I press it

no danger, nice fresh point, ready to go, and nothing's been flying around. Just dispose of this safely. You know, put it in an empty pop can or something like that

you know, when you've got your cans ready for recycling, so that this doesn't fall on a floor and

get in some little person's bare foot or something like that. But that's it. That's really all you need to know about marking. Start with one of these

You may have something like this around. Feel free to use that. Maybe you could put something like that on your Christmas or birthday wish

It's a draftsman's tools actually. It's drafting tools, but perfect for the kind of precise woodworking we're learning here