All square
I bought my Stanley No. 20 ages ago at an antique store, or a flea market, or maybe an estate auction. It was so long ago that I honestly don’t remember. It was filthy from years of use followed by years of non-use.
I bought my Stanley No. 20 ages ago at an antique store, or a flea market, or maybe an estate auction. It was so long ago that I honestly don’t remember. It was filthy from years of use followed by years of non-use.
But I liked it, and after cleaning the rosewood handle and shining up the brass, it quickly became my favorite.
It’s always been spot-on accurate. And even though I own several other squares, some of which are “better” than the old Stanley, it feels so good in my hand that I always reach for it over the others. But in checking it the other day, I discovered it was slightly out-of-square. Not sure how that happened. Maybe I dropped it and forgot; I don’t know.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to adjust one of these like some of my newer ones with a setscrew or whatever. Wanting to bring my favorite tool back to its old perfection, I used my second favorite tool – Google – to find a solution, and it was simple.
Since the inaccuracy was minor, I used a file on the edges of the blade, essentially changing its plane a minuscule amount. It’s tedious to do because you don’t want to go to far, so that meant file a little, do a squareness test, file a bit more, test again, etc.
It took a half hour of trial and error, but the square is now worthy of the name once again.
A.J. Hamler is the former editor of Woodshop News and Woodcraft Magazine. He's currently a freelance woodworking writer/editor, which is another way of stating self-employed. When he's not writing or in the shop, he enjoys science fiction, gourmet cooking and Civil War reenacting, but not at the same time.