Ever need to mark a piece of wood for identification purposes, but with what?
No marking pens, sometimes not even a pencil.
Enter a piece of black board chalk.
Low cost, leaves a nice white mark, and can easily be removed when finished.
Funny what you can learn if you keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and just watch a craftsman do his/her job.
Lew
chalk is great- sometimes.
if the wood is getting painted or is being left raw no problem. however, I have had ghost marks of the chalk show up after stain and especially after waterborne clearcoats. I no longer use chalk as a marker on interior finish work.
Some of us even have different colors in the drawer.
Chalk is also very useful at the wood dealer when selecting stock. You can roughly mark out stock for highly visible and important parts, changing your mind as often as necessary. The chalk lasts long enough so it's still visible when you get the material back to the shop, so you won't forget what you had in mind.
If I'm marking logs or boards in a pile to mean "I'm buying this one" then I use water-based paint dabbers from the Early Learning Centre. Bright fluo colours, not anything that can;t be got rid of later. My son is 11 now, so I've had these a few years since he was finished with them!
For more permanent marking, I use a timber marking crayon. It's a double-sized coloured crayon in a wooden holder - just like a colouring crayon, only bigger and not easily broken. It's just the "right thing"
- works fine and doesn't wash off.
How else do you do rough layout on a big board for which order you're going to cut the drawerfronts etc. from it? I couldn't work without one!
OTOH, I find blackboard chalk to be crude and blunt. I use tailors' chalk (sharp-edged triangles) instead.
If I'm marking logs or boards in a pile to mean "I'm buying this one" then I use water-based paint dabbers from the Early Learning Centre. Bright fluo colours, not anything that can;t be got rid of later. My son is 11 now, so I've had these a few years since he was finished with them!
For more permanent marking, I use a timber marking crayon. It's a double-sized coloured crayon in a wooden holder - just like a colouring crayon, only bigger and not easily broken. It's just the "right thing"
- works fine and doesn't wash off.
How else do you do rough layout on a big board for which order you're going to cut the drawerfronts etc. from it? I couldn't work without one!
OTOH, I find blackboard chalk to be crude and blunt. I use tailors' chalk (sharp-edged triangles) instead.
I use chalk mostly to indicate orientation of pieces (stock) and to mark out bisquits, and I once had the problem of not being able to get rid of some blue chalk in the finishing process, it had insinuated itself into the grain somehow.
Compressed air and a dust gun have proved to be the best way of removing it, just prior to pre-finish. No more probs.
-P.
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