Mortise Gauge

 

I ordered this mortise gauge maybe a month or so ago, and it just arrived. I got it via AliExpress from https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003389703825.html and it was pretty cheap; about thirty bucks including postage.

It's well made with no slop in the bars. The circular blades need a bit of sharpening, but that's easily done. The bars are graduated, though I think that's likely to be of limited use as the fence has a cut-out to house the blades, which means that the graduations will only ever be an estimate as there's no hard-cut-off to read them against.

The blades don't roll on their shafts, so the blades act just like a normal knife.

It's a decent enough piece of kit, but I don't like it as much as my traditional pointy beech mortise gauge. The lines left by the rollers aren't as definite or easy to see as those left by scratch-points or blades.