Setting out

Also called: setting-out, marking out, rod, setting out rod

Setting out is marking a piece of joinery or a building job full size, with every line, joint and dimension drawn on before any cutting starts, so that the work is planned once and cut to a fixed record rather than measured afresh at every step.

Rods and templates

A story rod carries a building's true dimensions, and a door stile's layout takes the door's height across from the story rod onto the stile's back edge, with a small allowance added. A height rod does a similar job for an opening: it is set out between the top of the stone sill and the soffit reveal, or, if there is an arch, to the springing, with the rise added on separately. Where a piece of work is too large to draw on the rod at its true size, it is laid out as a broken section instead, a section with a piece left out and the missing dimension written in as a figure. Arched centres are commonly laid out with either a radius rod, an arm pivoted at the centre of the curve, or a trammel, a beam fitted with sliding points for the same purpose; working with a radius rod means either calculating the radius directly or finding its centre by bisection. A close or housed stair string needs a pitch-board plus a margin templet and two wedge templets, one for the tread and one for the riser, to set it out. A rod checked as accurate and then reused cuts the risk of repeating the same error across several matching pieces. On a router jig, the same idea appears in miniature: the plunge depth comes from the gap left between the router's stop rod and its stop once the bit has bottomed out, and where the tool's own scale cannot be trusted, shims or spacers can set that gap precisely instead.

Marking the timber

In hand layout, the marking is struck from a back edge that has first been planed dead straight, with both faces then gauged to width from that same edge; a machine alternative to this method also exists. Early-stage layout is often drawn with single lines only, leaving the members' width and thickness to be added later. Marking out generally falls into two stages, rough marking before the timber is sawn to size and final marking before the joints are cut. A short board with a slight curve in it needs only a couple of extra shavings' width allowed for when its finished width is marked, enough to plane the curve away. Laying out a bridle joint conventionally divides the timber's thickness into three equal parts. In setting out a sash frame head, the sill is rested against it and the pulley stile's face lines are marked from it. For sash marginal bars, one bar is set out first as a master, then all the bars are clamped together and squared across both sides for their mortices and tenons; by design the shoulders are cut a shade long rather than to the exact line.

Who sets out, and where it can go wrong

In a traditional workshop the foreman usually carries out the setting-out and settles any difficulties that arise from it, though he may hand part of the work to a trusted worker. Spotting a method of construction that simply cannot be built is also part of a craftsman's job at this stage: as Riley (1905) put it, "it is the business of the craftsman to detect this when setting out his work." On-site work at the start of a job covers several distinct setting-out steps, of which at least one always comes before any building begins. A staircase's two strings must always be set out together as matching partners. Ordinary-grade newel or geometrical stair work is commonly built without a dedicated layout rod at all, though a housed string, as noted above, needs its pitch-board and templets. A turned newel post is marked and bored for its squares before it goes to the turner, which heads off mistakes in where those squares fall.