 how to mark up your woodworking components so you don't get confused. A woodworker is Paul Carlson here, a small workshop guy. I posted a video a while back and I showed a system that I had developed and it was about marking up workpieces to know what was top, what was bottom, what was left, what was right, what was front, what was back, what was smooth, what was 90 degrees. And it involved a lot of blue tape and a lot of letters and numbers and matching things that joints and stuff. And I asked people if they had a different marking system in the comments. And I got a couple of people who responded with a very simple carpenter's triangles or cabinet maker's triangles. So I did a lot of research, couldn't find it for a long time and then finally, finally discovered it. I actually found some marking systems for Czechoslovakia and Poland and Great Britain and everywhere, but the good old USA. And finally I found a fine woodworking magazine September slash October 2013 article and this is my future marking system. Let's start with the simplest of all things. You're dimensioning some boards, you're running them over your jointer or you have used your number seven bench plane in order to get a nice flat surface. So you mark it with a squiggle. You want to decide which edge you're going to make as 90 degrees to that flat surface and then get that to be, ooh, a little splinter there. Welcome to the workshop. That's what happens. So anyway, get your 90 degree edge, check it with a combination square or a dual square. Make sure it's nice and 90 degrees to that flat face. Don't worry about what it is to anything else and mark that with a little. I think you'd call that a carrot kind of two thirds of a triangle and mark the two where they come together. Now we've got perfect reference surfaces for the future. Now you know what to put up against the fence. You know what to put down in the thickness planer. You've got that board that you've dimension and you're going to probably do 50 boards like this for a decent project. So get them all marked so you don't lose track of which one is flat and your reference surface. All right, that's simple enough. I want to take just a minute and ask you just a few favors. Number one, I want to thank my patrons. I would welcome more patrons. There is some expense to maintaining a YouTube channel with software subscription fees and so forth. And then I'd love it if you'd comment on the video and if you if you liked it, give it a like and subscribe if you haven't subscribed to my channel. Also, we have a woodworking group over on Facebook called Small Workshop Woodworking Community. We'd love to have you join that if you're crazy enough to be on Facebook. If you were doing a table top, some sort of a dining room table or something and you got all of your wood dimension and you have picked the grain, you know, taking the pieces of wood and put them together and look for the perfect grain and put any imperfections maybe down and done all of that work. Once you've decided how you want it set up, then use a triangle draw a triangle on it. The article I read said to point the triangle toward the front. In other words, I'm pretending that I'm over there where the camera is and this is the front over here. And so I'm going to draw a triangle pointing to the front. Now, I think the articles I saw in Europe said just the opposite. If you're standing over here, you're going to put the triangle pointing away from you. So your US market pointing toward the front. That's like a table top. What if you were talking about the back to a case of some sort. So you picked all the right stuff. You said, hey, I don't like that perfection there. So let's get rid of that. Oh, there it is there, but it's less. It's less there. I've got a mark. I decided that this is the way I want it in the back of my case. This is going to be the top here that I've got holding up. So if it's the vertical piece, the rule is to market with the same triangle across all three pieces. And with the apex of the triangle pointing what will be up. So this is always indicates up. So the convention is if it's a horizontal item, then the front of the triangle is pointing to what is the front. If it's a vertical item, the apex of the triangle is pointing to what is up. Now I want you to notice something about these three pieces when I separate them. All three of them have at least two marks. So that's another rule. Don't ever mark a triangle so that there's only one line on a workpiece. There always needs to be two lines so that it's very definitive how things go back together. So usually you want them ganged up and mark them and then if they get separated for some purpose, then you separate them. You can tell when these are separated how that triangle would go together. It certainly wouldn't go together this way anyhow, you know. So that's your triangle on a vertical back panel or front panel of some sort. What if you were doing a box? Here's the ugliest box in the world. But let's say that this is my drawer for a cabinet. This is going to be the front of my drawer and the two sides of my drawer and the back of my drawer. So I would put the front and the back together and mark them with a triangle. Isosceles triangle, meaning all three sides are approximately equal in a real isosceles triangle. They're all exactly equal but you're probably not going to draw them that well. Anyway, put the top and bottom together, mark a triangle pointing toward the front of the box or of the drawer. Put the two sides together and mark it with a triangle pointing to the front of the drawer. Then when you separate them and you've scrambled and you've sanded and you've done all sorts of things and you want to get it back together, it's very quick to figure out. Hey, that's the front. This is the top. There's the two sides. They point this direction. I've decided they're that way, not this other way. Here's the back and it's aimed that way. And so I've decided how my box is to be built. Once I mark it with my magical triangles, I can build my box that way. Let's get a little more complex. What if I wanted to build some sort of a cabinet that had shelves in it? So here I got three shelves. I got two sides. I got a kicker and I got whatever you call this, stretcher across here. All right, take my three shelves, put them together and mark them with the triangle pointing up. Now I can tell what's the face of my shelf because that's the thing with the mark on it. I can tell if this is the top one, the middle one or the bottom one by simply seeing how the triangle would be formed. And I can't turn them upside down. I really can't get them in the wrong orientation. So making sure that you keep your orientation is critical. Particularly when you're dealing with doing like dovetail joints and you've got to keep track of the outside show face of your tails and your pins and you don't want to get those messed up. So triangles work out really well for that. All right, the two sides, I would have had them together and drawn my triangle. Then when I separate them, I can easily see what's up on my sides, what's down, which one's right, which one's left and so forth. For my other little supplemental pieces, they get their own triangles. So I can see that, hey, this one goes like this. It doesn't go upside down like that. It doesn't go backwards like that. I've looked at it and I've decided that this is the way I want it. So I mark it. I can always do it that way. So there is your little bit more complex cabinet. What about feet or to a chair or to a stool or something of that nature? So let's say we're going to build an ottoman and I'm going to have four different feet, but they're going to get tapered on the outsides, all of the outsides and the insides are going to stay square. Once I've looked at the feet that I want to put together before I've done any profiling, I want to know exactly which one is going to be the left front, which one is going to be the right front and the left back and the right back. To do that, I cannot just mark them with a simple triangle because I've got kind of like two cents. And if I mark just these two with a simple triangle, it's not enough information to keep me from mixing up pieces. If I've decided I want them in a certain way with a certain orientation, then this is the way to mark them so you can keep them that way. Use a right triangle. So on this one here and this one, the apex goes to the front and the bottom part goes to the back. This also, with the right triangle, shows me that this is the outside edge of these two feet. Now again, you've got to use your imagination to assume that there's some depth here going down. But I bet you can handle that, right? So this is the top profile of four feet. Use a right triangle. Use a mirror image of that right triangle on the other two feet. I can now really quickly put them together. And the problem is, you know, you might be doing something where the chair's got two comparable feet. The ottoman has two feet. You're doing two sets of everything. So you've got a lot of legs to try to keep straight. If you have multiple pairs of legs or of anything, then you could just simply go to a convention of adding a second line. So this would be like my second set of four feet. And so I have started adding an additional line on at least each of the pieces. There's at least two lines that says this is set number two. If I had set number three, I'd maybe have three lines. All right, so mark your feet where there's four items with right triangles. Full around with that, you'll see why it works. Pretty cool. And all we're doing here is we just have isosceles triangles or right triangles for everything. So let's suppose that I've got this cabinet and I'm going to have a couple of doors on a cabinet. But the doors are going to open and close and they're going to be identical except for where they're hinged. Or maybe they are. Maybe you've got a little fancier design. So when you figure out from your view and standing in front of the cabinet, what's going to be the right door and the left door, you don't need the right, right door, left door on there. All you need to do is your right triangles. So put a right triangle on the panel of each pointing opposite direction so you know which way that panel goes. I now know this is the top of the panel. It's going to be this way. I'm not going to turn it over accidentally. Maybe my grain wouldn't match the way I want it to if I did that. And so here are my two panels marked. I know the outside. I know the top. I know the bottom. I know this is the face, not this. And I got all that information. Again, marked in a way that I can send it and get it off. Then I put my two styles together. Before this is formed, I put these two outside styles together and I do a right triangle facing out, you know, over the flat side or the right triangle on the inside. And then I put these two styles together and do the same thing. My two rails here, right triangle. In this case, facing to the left and right triangle facing to the right. Everything, I just simply cannot put that back together in a wrong way. That's really all I have. Just carry a similar system through to lots of things that you mark up. I want to feel like a real woodworker as I progress with my skills. So I'm going to drop by blue tape approach and I'm going to start learning how to do the triangles. I'm going to keep these models just for reference until it becomes ingrained in the old gray matter. And when I say old gray matter, I mean old gray matter. So you might do the same thing. If you build some little models, then keep them for reference. That is what I have for you today. A really simple cabinet makers triangle marking system or woodworkers marking system. And it's the only consistent convention that I've been able to find and it was pretty hard to find. You know, we're no longer in the world where we got masters teaching youngins or interns, you know, gurus teaching interns. Now we learn things on YouTube and this seems to be a topic not covered in YouTube. So I'm glad I could fill the void. Now I will now, as I go ahead at this and do another search, I'll find 400 videos on stay safe in your workshop and enjoy your life. Small workshop guy signing off.