Looks Like a Good Idea But...

Sometimes I come up with a quick idea  and fail to see why it might not work. When I want to cut off a piece of larger round stock or pipe by hand I often wrap a piece of paper around the workpiece and get the edges lined up and mark around the paper to get an accurate cutoff line and that works well.

On this occasion I clamped a piece of heavy wall pipe in the vise and dropped a large washer over it and traced the line.  Well, duh!  That doesn’t work when the vise jaws are uneven in height.  What seemed like a shortcut turned out to be a waste of time.  Doing things in a tried-and-true way usually saves the most time.

Incidentally, I would usually use the bandsaw to do a job like this but this piece of stock is one of my early scrap yard finds and I do not know the alloy.  It may be a variety of chrome moly.  The bandsaw blade just skates on it.  I have used the presto pen marker to write “No Bandsaw” on all those pieces.

The front vise jaw is about 1/16" low.