How to Use a Carpenter Square

Video Transcript

Hi I'm Drew Finn for Expert Village we are going to talk about standard hand tools and how to use them. This is a carpenter square I'm going to describe how to use it. You would notice that there is a measuring scale on the inside, there is one in the inside that starts with zero, there is one on the outside that starts with zero here which could help on your measuring. Now the primary thing to do uses of squareness of wood. Say we have this piece of ply wood that we want to cut. We could first check to see if it is square, now this has been cut pretty square, I can see a little bit of clearance here so I can tell it is just a little bit out of square. Sometimes you might have it up in a angle then you can lay this on it and we could draw, you can lay this on it we can draw a line. So we know this line is square to here now lets say what we need is to be completely square what we want to do is so we can mark it here and if we want just 12 inches wide we could use the scale down here. Mark of where 12 is, I'm goign to flip the scale over because we are using this, this is a factor edge you could see where it was cut at a factory so we know that it is nice and straight and we flip it over at the bottom. Line it up with the mark we just made and draw another line. Now we got the line all made, what you can do is line it up with the top and draw a vertical line here. I always like to doing is flipping it over and checking it from the other direction. Now another trick that we use is this was goign to be a perfect rectangle or a perfect square the distance between here and here should be the same as the distance from here to here. So we could use the scale on this again line it up with the point here, measure what it is and we could do the same here, what do you know they are both 17 inches. That it way we use a carpenter's square.

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