hey what's up guys and welcome back to the channel for today's tools day we're
gonna go back to the basics with a top 10 list so let's get into it
alright guys welcome back and today for tools day I thought we'd go back to the
basics and that is just talking about a simple square I've been asked to do this
video multiple times and I always thought it was kind of you know probably
not worth it there's a lot of videos out there on squares and their uses but
yesterday I had a visitor at my shop Ian from Wisconsin a young 8 year old boy
and hopefully Ian you're watching this video you said you watch all the videos
which I just I love and it really kind of got me here and made me start
thinking about the content I produce and the fact that maybe it's not just gonna
hit the professional level person but a young person that in five years 10 years
whatever it may be is gonna be looking for that knowledge and YouTube is such a
great place for the knowledge to basically rest and stay forever and so
I'm gonna go and do my own video on the square and that way it's a great place
to find it hopefully from here till whenever people will be able to
reference this video when just getting going in the trades but even you
tradesmen that have been doing this for a long time
I got 10 uses of the square and you might learn something so stick around
and let's get right into number one all right so the first and most simplest use
of a square is a simple square line or a 90 degree angle and let's say you're
just gonna make a cut on a board and you want to make a perfect cut you're gonna
line up this edge here which is a lip on the square you can see on your board put
it on your mark that you just measured and you're gonna make a cut now that's
your 90 degree cut simple now the next thing that's just basically built into
the square is the ability for a 45 degree angle and you can basically line
up your point here and now you've got a perfect 45 so that's the simplest use of
a square and that's number one now let's go to number two all right now with this
being a nice perfect 90 degree line from your lip that can
on your material it also allows you to use your Square as a guide to make a
nice square cut now one of the things that I see people doing is running the
square on the side facing them I personally like to run it on the
opposite side and that is for two reasons one because I think it's easier
to pull towards you and keep it locked in but also the square will extend out
past your material further which allows you to get that saw base plate squared
up and running true to the square versus if it's this way you don't have as much
meat on the material here to make sure you're running square so
once you have this locked into your location you can make that perfect
square cut and I think that's a great tip let's go on to number three now
we've already determined that we can make a nice perfect 90-degree line to
your material what if you want to do some odd angle well most squares also
have all of the angles right here on the diagonal the 45 degree mark and what's
great is here we've got a pivot point so if you want to make an angle you're
gonna set the square at that pivot point and just rock it till the desired angle
so let's say we want to do 30 degrees I'm gonna pivot it I'm gonna come out
here I'm gonna find my 30 degree line and I'm gonna line it up with the edge
of my material make my mark and now right here I've got a 30 degree angle
and it's easy to see the advantage of that if you're going to be doing rafters
which we'll get into later but let's go to number four all right so now that
you've got a 90 degree line the other great thing about a square is that
you've got all of these measurements that are up the 90 degrees side and you
can use them to make quick reference points let's say you're laying out a
doorway or something on a wall plate you can make a quick reference line and
reference the the cripple the jack or some of these squares are pretty cool
you've got once your 90 degree mark is there got an inch-and-a-half reference
point there this saves a step not having to turn
your square and make quick marks and now you've got crippled jack doorway and
you're good to go let's go ahead and go to number five all
right now I told you I was gonna talk about rafters and square is definitely a
huge benefit to have when cutting rafters and a lot of them are going to
put this conversion chart here so if you see that sometimes it's hard to see but
this is a conversion chart from pitch to degrees what's also nice is you don't
have to know this all the time because most squares are gonna have these
numbers here and you've got common and you've got hip Valley now we're talking
about common right now I'll also get into that a little bit but we won't go
into too much depth on how to cut rafters just so you understand that you
can do it with the square here now I'm gonna go ahead and do a 612 pitch and
what that means is that the roof is going up six inches while it goes over
12 inches so six inches of rise per one foot of run so we've got our pivot point
let's say we're gonna cut a rafter and we want a nice pitch so we get a plumb
fascia we're going to basically take our square and we're gonna rotate it till
right here on the common is a six so once the six lines up with the edge
of your material you can make your cut and now you have a six 12 pitch right
there and the six is a twenty six and a half so basically what I was saying is
you can come over here to the degrees which we already learned find twenty six
and a half and make your cut now if you're doing valleys or hips so gets a
little bit more complicated you're going to use this line in here so you'll
notice that if I'm making a six twelve common rafter cut I'm going out here but
whenever you get into a hip and Valley because of just trigonometry or
mathematics the angle is reduced and you're gonna use this six twelve
measurement for any hip and Valley but like I said we're not gonna get into
that let's just go ahead and go to number six all right now for this
next one you'll notice a little bit of a difference between these two squares
this is a simple cheap square and it works great for marking 90s 45s and
doing all of your angle pitch cuts marks but when it comes to things like
scribing you'll see this square has an opening in the middle with these points
right here now these points when you seed it up against your material are
gonna give you a basically a scribed point here so like if I stick my pencil
right in this mark it gives me a nice 1-inch line down my material two inches
now this square here has just a plethora of scribe marks so I can scribe anywhere
from basically three-eighths of an inch all the way up to basically five and a
half inches and that allows me let's say you've got a two by six which is sitting
here and I need a two by four scribing is perfect way to get those
perfect lines down your material even if the material isn't perfectly straight so
you can't necessarily mark here mark here and snap a line on all lumber
because it ain't perfect but by scribing it allows me personally I do this a lot
to make a nice perfect line all the way down the length of the material for
whatever dimension I'm looking for and make that rip cut so squares are great
for making scribe lines and let's go ahead now and get into number seven all
right now let's say you've got an existing structure that's already built
and you want to know the angle of it you can take your square you can set it on
your pivot point and if you have a torpedo level find where it is level and
then you can reference either the degree mark or the common mark here for the
common cut which this is about set at a 1012 pitch or a 38 degree angle and then
you can get a nice plumb line and obviously yes you could use your level
to figure that out or if you've got a square that already has the bubble built
into it you can just do that with one less tool find your line boom
good to go alright let's do number eight all right now this next one we're going
back to a saw now these are out on the job site or wherever and they're getting
banged around you always want to make sure that you're cutting basically
perpendicular to your material so that is where you could take a square that
you know is square you can set it down on your base plate and check your blade
to be perpendicular to your blase base plate now obviously that doesn't always
happen but it's just a nice little secondary use of the square to always
check you can do that with circular saws table saws and miter saws all right
number nine all right now this next one might be a little far-fetched but it's a
good tip in case you ever need it it's using a plumb bob which is any sort of a
weight here centered on a string and what we're doing is let's say you want a
nice level line here and you don't have a level first off go get yourself a
level but if you don't you can take your square you can take that string right
into your pivot line and then all you're going to do is you're going to rotate
your level or sorry your square right until you hit that forty-five degree
mark now remember the bottom here we've got all these 45 degrees now what that's
gonna do is it's gonna give you a nice level line to hang that picture on your
wall so it doesn't bother you for the rest of your life now let's go to number
10 all right now for this last and final use of a square here let's say you want
to make a perfect circle or at least really close it's more like a bush fix
you're out in the job site and you're cutting some siding and you've got to go
through a penetration and you got your center mark of your circle you're gonna
take a nail and let's say you're gonna do a four inch circle for some PVC
coming out of the wall you're gonna mark your two inch which is half the diameter
which is going to give you the radius of your circle set your square inside the
groove line up a nice scribe point here and then you're just going to rotate
that sucker around make sure that your pencil is sure
enough to get actually all the way down I think you guys get the point it's a
nice way to make a quick circle pretty efficiently and it's better than finding
the nearest coke bottle to make it so there you go all right now
bonus tip guys have you ever checked your square to make sure that it's
actually square it's very simple all you're gonna want to do is find a
straightedge you're gonna want to line it up on that straight edge and make a
mark on your 90 degree side now all you have to do is basically just turn over
your square come back in and line it up right here at the pivot point on your
pencil line and make another pencil line now this might seem crazy but you want
to check this often because especially with aluminum squares what happens is
these get rounded over they can get bent they can get dropped and it can change
the way your square line actually is and honestly is this gonna matter in most
framing applications probably not but it's always good to just double check
make sure that your square is square and this obviously will get bigger and be
more profound the bigger the material is or the longer that you're trying to make
square those are the top 10 uses that I could think of how I use a square in my
daily job out on the construction site and hopefully it helps somebody I know a
lot of you might be laughing saying we all know that Kyle it's a square of
course it makes a square mark but to me I think it's one of those things that
I'm hoping I'm helping the next generation I'm hoping I'm helping in
when he grows up become a good carpenter and learn tricks of the trade without
actually making the mistakes first in order to learn them so whether it's a
cheap square or an expensive square the important part is that it's a priceless
tool for every carpenter or really anybody that's working with any sort of
material to make quick reference cuts quick reference
Marx and do some of the other oddball things that you never thought you maybe
could use a square for so appreciate the support make sure you guys go check out
the current build series it's going to end up being pretty epic and we'll catch
you guys on the next video thanks a lot