Butt Gauge

identity

Name: Butt Gauge
Regional / alternate names: Butt Marking Gauge, Butt & Rabbet Gauge (Stanley's own catalog name for the No. 92), Door Hanging Gage, Hinge Gauge — all names found refer to the same functional family; no evidence found of a competing regional term.
Family / category: Layout and marking tools → Edge-referenced scribing gauges → Marking Gauge family, hinge-mortise specialist branch
One line: A marking gauge built to lay out a door-hinge mortise on both leaves of the joint — door edge and jamb rabbet — from a single setting, so the two mortises align without re-measuring.

✦ how NOT to use it

Not-for: jobs the butt gauge should never do

• General, non-hinge marking or layout work. No source found (despite direct searching) of anyone using a butt gauge this way — its value is entirely in the fixed-head clearance geometry built for one specific job, and for any other layout task it offers no advantage over a plain Marking Gauge while being harder to understand.

Dangerous: misuse that injures the user

• Not found despite direct searching. As a hand-scribing layout tool with sharpened spurs similar to any other member of the marking-gauge family, no source (forum, blog, dealer, patent text) described an injury account specific to this tool. Stated plainly rather than manufacturing a generic caution to fill the space — consistent with this corpus's honest-gap discipline for other members of the marking-gauge family (the sibling Wari-Kebiki (Splitting Gauge) and Panel Gauge entries carry the same honest gap in this class).

Damaging: misuse that ruins the tool or the work

• Using the wrong mortising follow-through for the hinge type at hand — Fine Homebuilding commenter huskiedad's real trade distinction (radius-corner hinges vs. square-corner hinges need different finishing tools after the gauge lines are struck: a router for radius corners historically, a corner chisel for square ones) is direct evidence that the gauge's marked lines are only half the job, and following them with the wrong finishing method produces a bad-fitting mortise even though the gauge itself worked correctly.
• Reasoned extension, not independently sourced this run: because the tool's whole value is "set once, don't re-set," disturbing the fixed-head setting between marking the jamb and marking the door reintroduces the exact misalignment risk the tool exists to remove — the equivalent failure a plain gauge has by design, self-inflicted on a tool built specifically to avoid it.

Beginner-trap: mistakes that look fine until they aren't

• Not understanding the multi-spur logic without instructions. Two independent, named, real accounts (Trevor Walsh on Sawmill Creek; rockinroger on Fine Homebuilding) describe owning a butt gauge for years without being able to work out how to use it — unlike a plain gauge's single obvious pin-and-fence logic, the butt gauge's three interdependent presets are not self-evident from handling the tool, and a beginner can set it wrong without any sign until the door doesn't hang square.
• Depth mis-set — reasoned extension from adjacent, well-sourced general hinge-installation guidance (Monroe Engineering, "5 Mistakes to Avoid When Installing Door Hinges"): mortising too deep causes a hung door to sag and bind, mortising too shallow leaves the hinge proud and creates a visible gap, with roughly 1/8" as the commonly cited target depth. This is general hinge-mortising guidance, not a butt-gauge-specific incident account, and is labeled as such rather than presented as directly sourced to this tool.

Lineage-misuse: treating it like its ancestor or descendant

• Treating it like a plain Marking Gauge — expecting to re-set it by hand between marks. The entire mechanical point of the fixed head and sliding carrier is that the user does NOT re-measure between the jamb mark and the door mark; using it with a plain gauge's habits (re-measuring each setting by eye) throws away the tool's one real advantage and reintroduces the alignment risk it was patented to remove.
• Treating it like a router hinge-mortising template. A real, sourced trade-level tension: ContractorTalk's professional-carpenter forum ("What are guys using to router doors and jambs these days?!?") documents site carpenters discussing current router-jig setups for production door work, while fitz's own hand-tool blog post shows a working joiner deliberately keeping the gauge-and-chisel method for teaching and for jobs where a router template's separate depth-stop setup and bearing-guided outline aren't worth rigging. The tools solve the same problem by genuinely different mechanisms — a scribed knife line versus a bearing-guided cutout — and expecting one to behave like the other (e.g. expecting gauge-marked lines to give you the router template's automatic depth control) is the lineage-misuse trap.
• Treating it like Goodell's Combined Hinge Gage and Square. The Traut/Stanley mechanism (fixed-head geometry) and the Goodell mechanism (an actual square blade built into the gauge) solve the "squaring" problem two different ways. This corpus's own parent Marking Gauge entry generalized the butt gauge as having "multiple preset points + square element," which this run's direct patent reading shows is only true of the Goodell design specifically — a real distinction worth not collapsing.

correct use

What it's genuinely good at. Laying out a hinge mortise so the door leaf and the jamb leaf align without re-measuring — the exact job Stanley's own factory instructions for the No. 95 describe in four steps (transcribed in full on Internet Archive, "Stanley Improved No. 95 Butt Gauge"): (1) square the mortise ends — with the door fitted in its frame, the gauge's machined edges strike knife lines for the top and bottom of each mortise on both door and jamb simultaneously; (2) gauge the door/jamb setback — one spur registers from the back of the rabbeted jamb, the other from the edge of the door, both correctly positioned by the tool's fixed geometry in a single setting; (3) gauge for hinge-leaf thickness — a separate bar with its own spur marks mortise depth, using a guide line on the gauge's base so the mark starts and stops exactly at the squared knife lines; (4) a variant procedure exists for doors/jambs receiving a nailed-on strike or stop, where the width spur is reset to the strike/stop width.

How to use it well. Set it once against an already-hung or test-fitted door and frame, and trust the fixed-head geometry rather than re-measuring by hand between the jamb and door marks — the entire value of the tool is in not re-setting.

✦ matching

does: transfers an aligned hinge-mortise layout (position, setback/reveal, and depth) from door jamb to door edge in a single setting; squares the mortise-end knife lines using its own machined edges as a registration face.

suits: new-construction door hanging, door/jamb replacement matched to existing hinge positions, restoration work on period doors, and any hand-tool hinge-mortising job where the builder wants the door and jamb mortises to align without separate measuring steps.

kit-fit: PAIRS WITH a marking/cutting knife (for the actual scribed lines), a chisel (for chopping the mortise), and a router plane (for flattening the mortise floor to depth) — fitz's own documented sequence. SUBSTITUTES FOR the combination of a plain Marking Gauge + try square + separate depth measurement, collapsing three re-settings into one. Does NOT replace a router hinge-mortising template for production/volume work — see Lineage-Misuse.

not-for (project-keyed): general marking or layout work unrelated to hinge mortises (no source found describing it used this way — its fixed-head geometry is purpose-built to one clearance standard and offers no advantage over a plain gauge for anything else); high-volume commercial door hanging, where the setup-per-door speed of a router template beats a hand-gauged layout.

access: a beginner can use one correctly by following the maker's own instructions step by step (as Stanley's factory sheet is written to do), but two independent, named accounts (a Sawmill Creek collector, a Fine Homebuilding commenter) describe owning one for years without being able to work out its multi-spur logic unaided — this is a tool whose correct use is not self-evident from its shape, unlike a plain gauge. Guidance (the original instruction sheet, or a modern equivalent) meaningfully changes the access picture.

revival: a maker restoring an old door, building new doors for an old house, or simply wanting the "set once, mark twice, aligned" workflow without buying a router jig has real reason to pick this tool up — Trevor Walsh's own account (kept his for years "for the day I buy an old home and build new doors for it") is exactly this revival moment in the wild.

anatomy

• Fixed butt-gage head — a machined block sized to the standard door/jamb clearance (Traut's patent specifies a typical 1/16" reveal), providing the tool's built-in "square" registration without a separate square blade.
• Sliding cutter-carrier — holds the marking spur(s); repositions across the fixed head rather than requiring the whole tool to be re-set, so the same setting transfers from jamb to door.
• Auxiliary sliding thickness-gage point — a second bar/head, set independently, that marks hinge-leaf thickness for mortise depth.
• Small machined edges functioning like a try-square's registration face, used to strike the knife lines marking the top and bottom of the mortise on both door and jamb (per Stanley's own factory instruction sheet for the No. 95, transcribed on Internet Archive).
• Marking spurs, sharpened with clearance so a hung door swings without the hinge binding — the same general spur-sharpening discipline as the parent Marking Gauge family.

variations

trades

• Door hanging / site carpentry — the tool's core, best-documented audience (see Human Side and the parent Marking Gauge entry, which already frames this as "a full commercial branch 1872–1990s").
• Joinery / cabinetmaking — hand-tool joiners (fitz's documented class) use the gauge-and-chisel method for hinge work as part of broader case and door construction, sometimes preferring a plain cutting gauge instead of a dedicated butt gauge.
• Restoration — the clearest modern-use context found this run (Trevor Walsh's own stated reason for keeping his); matching new doors or hardware to existing period hinge positions on old houses.

lineage

Ancestors

• The general Marking Gauge, directly — the butt gauge is a special-purpose descendant, not a separate invention lineage. Marking Gauge's own entry already names it: "Butt gauge — the door-hanging specialist (Stanley No. 92 patented 1892; No. 95½ sold for nearly a century) — a distinguished cousin, so specialized it left the family's general work behind."
• The specific failure being fixed: an ordinary marking gauge has one adjustable pin pair and no built-in square. Laying out a hinge mortise correctly requires three separate, related measurements — the mortise's top/bottom position (must be identical on door and jamb), the door/jamb setback (the "reveal" a hinge needs to swing without binding), and the mortise depth (the hinge leaf's thickness) — and a plain gauge forces the user to re-measure and re-set between each one, with every re-set a chance for the two mortises to drift out of alignment. The butt gauge's patented design (see below) collapses all three into one tool, set once.
• The primary source read in full for this entry, US Patent 481,515 (Justus A. Traut, Aug. 23, 1892, assigned to Stanley Rule and Level Co.), states its own purpose directly: "to provide in a single gage of simple construction a butt-gage, a rabbet-gage, and an adjustable mortise-gage." Traut's design uses a fixed "butt-gage head" (Fig. 5–6) sized to the standard door/jamb clearance, a sliding cutter-carrier that repositions (not the whole gauge) to transfer the layout from jamb to door edge, and a separate sliding thickness point on an adjustable head (Fig. 9) for mortise depth.
• A corpus wording correction, caught this run: the parent Marking Gauge entry's variations table describes the butt gauge generically as having "multiple preset points + square element." Traut's own patent text, read directly, does not describe a square as part of the No. 92's mechanism — the "squaring" function comes from the fixed-head geometry, not a separate square blade. A true combined square-and-gauge tool does exist as a documented sibling design, not this one: A. D. Goodell's "Combined Hinge Gage and Square" (US Patent 531,114, Dec. 18, 1894), made for decades by Goodell Tool Co. for Millers Falls and Sears/Craftsman. The two mechanisms are related but distinct, and this entry keeps them apart rather than folding Goodell's square into every butt gauge's anatomy.

Descendants

• No further mechanical descendant confirmed this run. The tool's functional niche — transferring an aligned hinge-mortise layout from jamb to door in one setting — is what modern router hinge-mortising templates (e.g. Porter-Cable-style bushing templates) now do by a completely different mechanism (a guide bushing riding a cutout, not a scribed knife line). That is a lineage replacement, not a descendant, and is treated as such in Lineage-Misuse below.

Contemporaries

• A dense, independently-patented sub-family, not just one Stanley model. Jim Fox's tool-collector research (see references) documents a continuous run of dedicated butt/hinge-gauge patents from 1872 through at least 1956, each by a different named inventor, several manufactured commercially: Marden (1872), William McCullough (1883, three scratch points/two arms), Henry Plante (1886), Horace Fulton (1888, later copied as the Dikeman Mfg. Co. No. 75 "Handy Butt Gauge" after 1906), Cereal LeFrancois "Door Hanging Gage" (1890), John Murphy, a Springfield Armory machinist (1890), E. Wright "Door Hanging Gage" (1893), A. D. Goodell (1894, the combined square variant above), V. B. Staples "Door Butt Gage" (1897), George Thompson (1900), the Gelbaugh gage (1904, later refined), N. A. Carping of Chicago (1905), James Duffy of Seattle, produced by Atkins Saw Co. (1910), Matthew Biersdorf of Los Angeles (1915, eight scratch points), and George Palm's cast-aluminum combination rabbet/router plane-gauge-marker (1956, successor to a 1928 Illinois Stamping & Mfg. Co. tool). One of these, Wells & Meyer's "Butt Gauge" (US Patent 1,450,676, Hubert J. Meyer and Newton C. Wells of Los Angeles, granted April 3, 1923), was independently cross-verified this run directly on DATAMP rather than taken only from the secondary source.
• The plain marking gauge + try square + marking knife, used together as a manual substitute — the method a hand-tool joiner reaches for instead of a dedicated butt gauge (see Correct Use and Lineage-Misuse).
• Modern router hinge-mortising jigs/templates — the tool that has largely displaced the butt gauge in production door-hanging (see Matching).

history

Origin — tied to the spread of cast/wrought butt hinges in American building, honestly under-anchored. General hardware-history sources (retail/trade pages, not primary historical texts) state that cast-iron butt hinges were patented in England in 1775 and became the standard door hinge in American building through the 19th century, but this run found conflicting and weakly-sourced claims about the exact date range and did not locate a single authoritative citation — flagged as an honest gap rather than asserted as fact. What is better anchored: Fox's patent chronology shows a continuous run of dedicated butt/hinge-gauge patents beginning in 1872 and running through the 1920s (with a late outlier in 1956), which tracks the boom period of balloon-frame residential construction and mass-produced door hardware — but no source found this run explicitly states 1872 as an origin point for the tool itself beyond it being the earliest patent Fox's research located.

The Stanley line, the best-documented thread. Fox and multiple dealer records agree Stanley made an early unmarked/uncataloged wooden butt gauge before the patented No. 92 (1892, patent above, discontinued 1939 per Fox), then introduced the No. 95 in 1897, with the No. 95½ and No. 94 as variants of essentially the same design — the No. 94 substituting a japanned finish for nickel plating during WWII, a wartime metal-restriction substitution consistent with Stanley's broader catalog history. Every dealer listing found (eBay, Tooltique, Fine Tool Journal) marks surviving No. 94/95-family gauges "PAT. 2-28-11" — but this run could not locate the actual US patent number behind that Feb. 28, 1911 date despite checking Google Patents and DATAMP directly. That gap is stated plainly rather than guessed at.

A form-follows-failure sequence, sourced directly from the earliest verified patent. Traut's 1892 patent specification states its own rationale in almost textbook Petroski terms: a plain gauge requires separate re-settings for each of the three hinge-mortise measurements, and each re-setting is where a jamb/door mismatch creeps in. The patented fix — one fixed head, one sliding carrier repositioned rather than re-measured, one auxiliary depth point — is a direct, named answer to that specific failure, not a generic "better gauge" claim.

Manufacturing spread beyond Stanley. Fox's research (corroborated by an independently-fetched second version of the same article, published in a tool-collector club newsletter) documents Dikeman Mfg. Co., Goodell Tool Co. (supplying Millers Falls and Sears/Craftsman under the Goodell combined-square design), General Hardware Mfg. Co. of New York (copying Stanley's style for Montgomery Ward's "Lakeside" and Sears's "Craftsman" private labels), and Illinois Stamping & Mfg. Co. of Chicago (a 1928 cast-aluminum combination tool). Stanley itself is also documented manufacturing gauges sold under other companies' names — Winchester, Sterns, Shapleigh, Sargent, and Simmons — a private-label pattern this corpus has already documented for other Stanley layout tools.

✦ human side

Traditions & trades. Door hangers and site carpenters are the tool's core audience — Sawmill Creek forum user Jim Koepke states it plainly: "The Butt Gauge was a specialized tool to aid in the installation of Butt Hinges. If a new door is being installed in a frame, the measurements can be taken from where the previous hinges are in the frame and transferred to the door. The tool is smaller, taking up less room in the tool box than most other marking gauges." Fellow forum member Bill Houghton frames its narrowness directly: "They were/are optimized for architectural hinges — house doors. They are marking gauges, so you could use them for other purposes, but whether other gauges would be more comfortable/efficient — not sure." (Sawmill Creek Woodworking Community, "Butt gauges - who uses them/how useful are they?", thread started June 19, 2011 by Alfred Kraemer.)

A tool people own before they understand it. Two independent, named accounts describe buying or inheriting a butt gauge without knowing how it worked. Trevor Walsh (Sawmill Creek, "Stanley #95 Butt Gauge," thread started June 18, 2011 by Jim Koepke): "I got a minty one in box with instructions... I didn't understand it at the time, so I kept it on the shelf. Then I got into woodworking and realized what I had. I'm glad I kept it, it looks like it will be very handy for the day I buy an old home and build new doors for it." Fine Homebuilding commenter rockinroger, on a 1982 tip-page reprint (finehomebuilding.com, "Door Butt Gauge," originally by John Toly of Richmond, CA, FHB #8): "I have an old Stanley butt gauge. I can't figure out how it works. Anyone know?" — answered by fellow commenter huskiedad, who also adds a real trade note: "I've used the Butt Marker for hinges with a radius corner before routers. Use a corner chisel for square corners."

A working joiner's deliberate choice not to use one. fitz (writing as "1snugthejoiner"), a teaching joiner, documents her own hinge-mortise method for an Anarchist's Tool Chest class — an ordinary cutting gauge, a chisel, and a router plane, not a dedicated butt gauge — and explains her reasoning against a commenter's router-plane-instead suggestion: "I always fumble a bit drawing it across for a clean baseline." Another commenter, thekiltedwoodworker, needles the router-template alternative directly ("Router template? Hmmm... there's a good sarcastic blog post in there somewhere"), which is real, live evidence that hand-tool-vs-jig is an active fault line in this specific corner of the craft, not a settled question. (rudemechanicalspress.com, "Butt Hinge Installation," Feb. 17, 2019.)

Makers: Stanley Rule & Level Co. (Nos. 92, 94, 95, 95½), Dikeman Mfg. Co. (No. 75, a documented copy of Horace Fulton's 1888 patent), Goodell Tool Co. (supplying Millers Falls and Sears/Craftsman), General Hardware Mfg. Co. (private-label for Montgomery Ward and Sears), and named individual inventors across five decades — Marden, McCullough, Plante, Fulton, LeFrancois, Murphy, Wright, Goodell, Staples, Thompson, Gelbaugh, Carping, Duffy, Biersdorf, Wells & Meyer, and Palm. This is an unusually dense single-purpose patent sub-family for one narrow job.

✦ proof of existence

Earliest dated/patented example. US Patent 481,515, Justus A. Traut of New Britain, Connecticut, assigned to Stanley Rule and Level Co., filed Dec. 22, 1891 (Serial No. 415,867), granted Aug. 23, 1892 — read in full, including drawings, on Google Patents. This is the earliest butt-gauge patent independently verified this run against a primary document.

A denser prior-art trail than the single Stanley patent suggests. Jim Fox's tool-collector research (see references) documents an earlier, uncataloged/unmarked Stanley wooden butt gauge that predates the No. 92, and a continuous, separately-patented sub-family beginning with a Marden gauge in 1872 — twenty years before Traut's patent — through at least nine further named inventors into the 1920s, with a late outlier design in 1956. One of these, Wells & Meyer's "Butt Gauge" (US Patent 1,450,676, granted April 3, 1923), was independently cross-checked this run directly on DATAMP, not taken solely from the secondary source.

Museum/collection records. No formal museum-collection record (comparable to, e.g., a Smithsonian or Science Museum Group accession) was located for the butt gauge specifically this run — flagged as unexplored, not as a confirmed absence. In its place, the strongest available survey document is Jim Fox's own tool-collector-society journal article (CRAFTS of New Jersey, The Tool Shed, No. 179, March 2015, pp. 1, 3–4 — fetched directly as a PDF, and corroborated point-for-point by an independently-published 2026 web version of the same author's research), which photographs and catalogs over twenty distinct butt gauges from Fox's own collection, captioned by maker and patent date — the closest thing to a survey record found.

Dated/collector-market examples. Multiple independent, dated dealer and collector listings, each with photographs, corroborate the No. 92 and No. 95-family gauges as real, physically extant, traded objects: Worthpoint ("Stanley No. 92 Marking Gauge"), the Fine Tool Journal Online Store, OldTools.com, an Etsy listing for a No. 92, and Tooltique UK's listing for a No. 95 marked "PAT. 2-28-11."

Honest gaps, stated plainly. The exact US patent number underlying the "PAT. 2-28-11" mark found on every surviving No. 94/95-family example was not located this run despite direct checks of Google Patents and DATAMP — only the marked date was confirmed, not the number. No British or other non-American butt-gauge patent or manufacturing history was found in this pass; every source located is American in scope, and this is flagged as an unexplored gap rather than a confirmed absence of a UK tradition.

references

• [BG1] US Patent 481,515, Justus A. Traut, "Gage," Stanley Rule and Level Co., filed Dec. 22, 1891, granted Aug. 23, 1892 — read in full, including drawings and claims. https://patents.google.com/patent/US481515A/en. kind: patent (primary, directly read)
• [BG2] Jim Fox, "The Butt Gauge," The Antique Tool Source, March 26, 2026 — theantiquetoolsource.com/2026/03/26/the-butt-gauge/ (note: the live URL differs from the shorter form cited in the parent Marking Gauge entry's MG31, same content). kind: blog/collector
• [BG3] Jim Fox, "The Butt Gauge," The Tool Shed (CRAFTS of New Jersey newsletter), No. 179, March 2015, pp. 1, 3–4 — fetched directly as PDF: craftsofnj.org/images/sitemedia/toolshed/Tool%20Shed%20No179-201503.pdf. An independently-published version of the same research, corroborating BG2 point-for-point with additional photo captions. kind: collector-society journal (directly fetched)
• [BG4] Milt Bacheller, American Marking Gages Patented and Manufactured — cited by Fox (BG2/BG3) as the standard identification reference for this sub-family; not independently obtained this run. kind: book (secondary citation, not directly verified)
• [BG5] US Patent 531,114, A. D. Goodell, "Combined Hinge Gage and Square," Dec. 18, 1894. kind: patent (cited via Fox; number independently spot-checked, full text not read this run)
• [BG6] US Patent 1,450,676, Hubert J. Meyer and Newton C. Wells, "Butt Gauge," granted April 3, 1923 — independently cross-verified directly on DATAMP: datamp.org/patents/displayPatent.php?pn=1450676&id=9098. kind: patent (primary, directly verified)
• [BG7] eBay listing, "Antique Stanley No 94 Butt Marking Gauge, Patent 2-28-11" — ebay.com/itm/406465213773. kind: dealer/collector listing
• [BG8] Tooltique, "Vintage Stanley Butt Gauge USA No: 95 Pat Date 2-28-11" — tooltique.co.uk/vintage-stanley-butt-gauge-usa-no-95-pat-date-2-28-11/. kind: dealer/collector listing
• [BG9] Worthpoint, "Stanley No. 92 Marking Gauge" — worthpoint.com/worthopedia/stanley-no-92-marking-gauge-stanleys-finest. kind: dealer/collector listing
• [BG10] Fine Tool Journal Online Store, "STANLEY No. 92 Butt and Rabbet Gauge" — ftjstore.com/measuring-and-marking/p/stann921. kind: dealer/collector listing
• [BG11] "Full text of 'Stanley Improved No. 95 Butt Gauge'" — Stanley Tools factory instruction sheet, transcribed on Internet Archive: archive.org/stream/StanleyImprovedNo95ButtGauge/. kind: primary maker instructions (directly read in full)
• [BG12] Sawmill Creek Woodworking Community, "Butt gauges - who uses them/how useful are they?", thread started June 19, 2011 by Alfred Kraemer — Bill Houghton and Jim Koepke posts. sawmillcreek.org/threads/butt-gauges-who-uses-them-how-useful-are-they.167987/. kind: forum
• [BG13] Sawmill Creek Woodworking Community, "Stanley #95 Butt Gauge", thread started June 18, 2011 by Jim Koepke — Trevor Walsh post. sawmillcreek.org/threads/stanley-95-butt-gauge.167925/. kind: forum
• [BG14] Fine Homebuilding, "Door Butt Gauge," tip by John Toly, Richmond CA, edited by Charles Miller, FHB #8 (1982); 2019 comments by rockinroger and huskiedad. finehomebuilding.com/1982/05/01/door-butt-gauge. kind: trade magazine + forum comments
• [BG15] fitz ("1snugthejoiner"), "Butt Hinge Installation," Rude Mechanicals Press Blog, Feb. 17, 2019 — rudemechanicalspress.com/2019/02/17/butt-hinge-installation/; comments by Jeff Simpson and thekiltedwoodworker. kind: blog (named practitioner) + forum-style comments
• [BG16] Monroe Engineering / OneMonroe blog, "5 Mistakes to Avoid When Installing Door Hinges" — monroeengineering.com/blog/5-mistakes-to-avoid-when-installing-door-hinges/. kind: trade blog (general hinge installation, not butt-gauge-specific — used as reasoned-extension source only)
• [BG17] ContractorTalk forum, "What are guys using to router doors and jambs these days?!?" — contractortalk.com/threads/what-are-guys-using-to-router-doors-and-jambs-these-days.435705/. Full thread content not retrievable this run (search-summary only). kind: forum (partial/unverified)
• [BG18] Time Tested Tools, "Stanley #95 butt gauge" — timetestedtools.net/stanley/stanley-95-butt-gauge/. Search-summary only, not directly fetched. kind: collector blog (partial/unverified)
• [BG19] House of Antique Hardware, "Butt Door Hinges"; Waterson USA, "Butt Hinges — Complete Guide" — general hardware-retail history pages, conflicting/weak sourcing on when butt hinges became the American standard. kind: retail/trade (low confidence, flagged)

forge images needed

• The Traut patent's own Fig. 5–6 comparison (jamb-marking position vs. door-marking position) redrawn as a clean instructional diagram — this is the single clearest illustration of what makes the tool different from a plain gauge.
• A labeled anatomy shot: fixed butt-gage head, sliding cutter-carrier, auxiliary depth-gage bar, in the style of this corpus's other marking-gauge-family anatomy images.
• A side-by-side of the Traut/Stanley fixed-head mechanism against the Goodell combined-square design, to visually anchor the corrected lineage distinction this entry makes.

The reviewer's corrections (14)

• BLOCKER — Exact claim: Traut's No. 92 has a fixed head whose geometry provides a built-in “square” registration; the parent entry is corrected because “a
• BLOCKER — Exact claim: The gauge transfers the mortise's “top/bottom position (must be identical on door and jamb),” setback, and depth in one setting; i
• BLOCKER — Exact claim: General, non-hinge marking is a job the butt gauge “should never do”; “no source found” anyone using it that way, and its fixed-he
• BLOCKER — Exact claim: The marking spurs are “sharpened with clearance so a hung door swings without the hinge binding.”
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: “Stanley No. 92” is “the best-documented, earliest patented commercial butt gauge.”
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: All alternate names “refer to the same functional family”; the anatomy and correct-use sections then present one combined mechanis
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: The Fine Homebuilding comment about using a “Butt Marker” for radius-corner hinges before routers proves a damaging butt-gauge mis
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: The gauge “PAIRS WITH a marking/cutting knife (for the actual scribed lines),” chisel, and router plane.
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: The entry's correct-use instruction is to “set it once against an already-hung or test-fitted door and frame,” trust the fixed hea
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: The history “tracks” the 1872-1920s patent sequence to balloon-frame residential construction and makes a cast/wrought-butt-hinge
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: Modern router templates “largely displaced” the butt gauge and constitute a lineage replacement; high-volume work is categorically
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: No formal museum record was found, so dealer listings plus Fox's collection are used as the proof-of-existence substitute.
• SHOULD-FIX — Exact claim: A beginner can use the tool correctly from the instructions, while two owner anecdotes establish that the shape is not self-eviden
• MINOR — Exact claim: The entry repeatedly treats “mortise depth” and “hinge-leaf thickness” as the same direct measurement and quotes roughly 1/8 inch