Nail cutting guide

thingiverse

I'm constructing a wool picker based on the blueprints in "The Handspinner's Guide to Selling" by Paula Simmons (2nd edition). These specifications demand cutting and reshaping approximately 200 twenty-penny bright nails. As part of this, they need to be cut down to about two inches long from their original four-inch length (the instructions are a bit unclear as to whether they want one and three-quarters or two and a quarter inches, but I found two inches to be a suitable compromise). They recommend feeding each nail into a drill press and then using a hacksaw to trim it to size before sharpening a new point, but this process seemed too labor-intensive. Instead, I printed out these dimensions to create a guide that allows me to use bolt cutters for precise repeat cuts. Simply place the nail with its head at the small end, then lay the large end flat on the face of the bolt cutters and you'll get a length that makes it easy to grind to the same size repeatedly.