3/11/2013 – This has been one of those ridiculously small tasks that I’ve been putting off for ages. My assembly table has a steel ruler close to it’s edge and inlayed flush with the surface. If you are interested to see how I’ve built this table you will find several chapters documenting the process in detail under the category “Bench” on this site.

Anyway the idea of having the ruler there is to speed up basic layout tasks such as marking out lengths of pieces of stock. In order to really make this easy one needs a stop at the zero end of the ruler so you can simply butt the one end against it and mark the appropriate length. In the picture below you can see what I mean.

The stop is simply a small piece of scrap Assegaai with a 6 mm hole accepting a bolt which slots into the T-channel on the side of the table’s edge, fixed with a few turns of a wing-nut. When it is necessary to remove it, it is simply flipped through 180º and it sits below the table’s surface. You will notice that the ruler was positioned so that the edge of the table is zero even though it does do run all the way to the edge.