Design a pencil guide in Easel with a center hole halfway between two pin holes. Change the body length and pin spacing for the boards you want to mark.
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Start from a blank workpiece
Make a plywood marking-tool body, with two separate dowels or steel pins and a pencil added after carving. Paul J. Bennett’s plywood tool shows how these parts fit together. First draw a 6 × 1-inch rectangle in Easel. Add two ¼-inch pin holes with their centers 5 inches apart, then a 5/16-inch pencil hole exactly halfway between them. Keep all three centers on the same line. The recording uses ¾-inch plywood and through-depth holes and an outside cut around the body. Match the thickness to your sheet, remove the holding tabs and sand the body after carving. Fit the pins so they project from the same face; rotate the tool until they touch opposite board edges, then move it along the board with the pencil in the middle. Check pin and pencil fit on scrap before cutting the body; this is a design demonstration, not a physically tested tool.
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Both tools put a pencil between two end pins. The plywood example has editable Easel shapes and assembly instructions; the brass example opens an imported machining pass rather than a body you can resize in Easel.
Centerline Marking Toolby Paul J. BennettPaul’s plywood tool uses a rounded body with a pencil through the middle. The shared Easel file contains the body and three holes, but its original outline is shallow: Paul finishes releasing the body with a band saw. Adjust hole depths for your sheet. The pins and pencil are separate parts, not pieces supplied by the CNC file.
Paw-Paw’s Center Finderby AndrewAndrew describes this center finder as a brass gift for Paw-Paw. Its shared preview opens an imported machining pass from a project named Center-Finder From Fusion 2, not editable native shapes. Use it as a brass-build reference, not a plywood design to resize or a verified metal-cutting recipe; the gallery’s Birch Plywood stock label does not describe the photographed brass body.
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Paul J. Bennett’s finishing instructions specify two 1½-inch lengths of ¼-inch wood dowel or steel round bar for the end holes. The pencil goes through the center hole when the tool is ready to use.
Project notes by Paul J. Bennett: read the source.
From Centerline Marking Tool by Paul J. Bennett.
Ask a questionKeep the pencil midway between equal-sized pins as you change the spacing. The pins must reach opposite edges of the board while the pencil touches its face.
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