I will be assembling several building kits over the coming weeks, so I decided to treat myself to a 'proper' small engineers square. It is probably a bit overkill for laser cut kits, but you never know I might someday make a brass loco kit? As you can see from the photo it is quite small, only 75 x 50mm, but beautifully made and is lovely to use. What I also like is that it for a change it is not made in China. Kinex is a a Slovakian company, though for some reason their advertising slogan is 'Swiss quality made in the Czech Republic'. I bought this off Amazon and paid just under £15 for it. However, I see the price has now risen to about £18. You can certainly get an engineers square cheaper than that, but what I think makes this worth the money, for me at least, is the fact it is made from one piece of metal and so lies flat. This allows it to be used with magnets to hold walls and corners of a card kit together.
I think it is a sound design touch that the inside corner is undercut, although the inside edge near the corner at the top seems a little rounded for a new item. Jim
Good morning David, As you say it's good to see tools these days that are not made in either China or India. I have some similar examples bought from the sadly no longer in business Eileen's Emporium. Two of them are 75 x 75mm and the other 100 x 100mm. They also did a 50 x 50mm (2") version which I planned to get but they went out of business before the next show that we would have both attended. The original one which is the one marked Eileen's was £3 and the others bought later were £4 and £5 respectively. They appear to have been laser cut from stainless steel and although they certainly don't look to be of the quality that yours does they have given good service. being flat they have advantages in some situations where the traditional type put the blade too far away from the workpiece. In other situations they don't and I have a number of the standard engineers squares for such occaisions.
I also find 123 parallel blocks really useful as well. Machined flat square and parallel and measuring 1" x 2" x 3" or 25mm x 50mm x 75mm, Used with some clamps you can hold the model square. Above ones are from Amazon The imperial ones are cheaper than the metric version from the above link. The blocks have tapped holes so you can connect them together. Paul
