We may receive a commission when you use our affiliate links. However, this does not impact our recommendations.
Today I’m in Portland, Maine, eating myself sick at Duckfat and studying the architectural details on the old houses in this coastal city.
As I started picking apart some Victorian houses on the city’s east side, I remembered something that a student once said about the English Layout Square I built for the December 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine.
The student held up the square and said, “It looks like the gables on a Victorian house.”
Well dang if he wasn’t right.
Today I saw the English Layout Square everywhere in the city. In fact, I’m to the point where I cannot “un-see” it on a typical Victorian house with gables. Check out these photos.
If you are interested in building this square, which is a great project, you can check out the short article in the December 2010 issue. If that plan isn’t enough for you, I have a great resource that can help. While I was teaching a class on how to build this square at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Robin Macgregor of Lie-Nielsen documented the entire process and loaded it up (with helpful captions) on the company’s Facebook page.
Go here to see the slideshow (you don’t have to be a member of Facebook). Robin is an excellent photographer and the step photos provide a lot of information we didn’t have room to print in the magazine.
When you complete your square, here’s a video on how to square it up. To make the patterns for the square, here’s a link to the SketchUp drawing of the square.
The only other thing I could do that would be more helpful than all this information is to come to your shop and build it for you. But where’s the fun in that?
— Christopher Schwarz
Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. We may receive a commission from sales referred by our links; however, we have carefully selected these products for their usefulness and quality.
