INTRODUCTION
Most woodworkers have to be able to read scaled
technical drawings, interpret them and produce work
accordingly; but joiners also have to be skilled at
producing drawings themselves. Apart from design-
ing joinery items – which individual joiners might do
- to scaled, drawing- board size, it is often necessary
to redraw the plan- and/or sectional- views of a scaled
drawing to a full- size scale (known as setting out) and
it is also necessary to mark joint- lines and mortises,
etc, onto the joinery components (and this is known
as marking out). This additional skill, stemming from a
basic knowledge of drawing principles involving sec-
tional views, etc (to be covered here), usually develops
with experience and an acquired knowledge of joinery
detail.
SETTING OUT AND MARKING
OUT
Setting out and marking out, therefore, is the criti-
cal part of transferring the details and measurements
from scaled drawings by others (or from one’s own
designs), onto the separate parts of the joinery- item
- or onto separate setting out boards. This transfer-
ence of detail – which has to be very precise – is
widely known as setting out and marking out. The
difference between these two procedures is that if a
joinery item is repetitive (might need to be repeatedly
produced over a period of time); or complex in detail
(like a quarter- turn of four tapered (winding) steps),
these items are set out to full- size measurements on
rigid, purpose- made ‘drawing boards’ known in the
trade as rods. A rod can be a 150 × 25mm prepared
softwood board, long enough to accommodate the
full- size sectional, detailed drawing of a door, or
it can be a half- sheet (1.2m × 1.2m) of hardboard,
large enough to set out the tapered steps referred
to above. To emphasise the pencilled detail on rods,
they are usually painted with white emulsion – and
repainted once the rod has served its purpose and is
required for a different setting out. By comparison,
marking out refers to one- off items of joinery, whereby
the setting out of shoulders, mortises, lengths and
widths, etc, is done directly onto the joinery com-
ponents themselves, instead of onto a rod – and also
refers to joinery components being laid onto a rod,
so that the shoulders, mortises, lengths and widths,
etc, can be transferred onto them. Exceptionally,
if more than one identical joinery- item is being
made at the same time, instead of drawing a rod,
marking out is done on the separate parts of one of
the items, then the various parts of this are used as
‘rods’ (or patterns) for the others. To avoid confu-
sion, though, each first- marked part should have
‘ROD’ (or pattern) pencil-marked on it. This tech-
nique is also used by many joiners for one- off pieces
of joinery, to avoid the additional work of setting out
a rod.DRAWING PRACTICE GUIDE
The drawing practices referred to below are based
on the recommendations laid down by the British
Standards Institution, in their publications entitled
Construction drawing practice, BS 1192. Note that BS
1192: Part 5: 1990, which is not referred to here, is a
guide for the structuring of computer graphic infor-
mation.COMMON SCALES USED ON
DRAWINGS
Figure 2.1: Parts of metric scale rules, graduated in
millimetres (mm), are illustrated below. Each scale
represents a ratio of one unit (a millimetre) to (or
equalling) a number of units (millimetres). Commonly
used scales are 1:100, 1:50, 1:20, 1:10, 1:5 and 1:
(full size). For example, scale 1:10 = one- tenth of full