Checking squareness on the cheap

hey guys welcome to bar Z my name is Stan and I got asked an interesting question the other day they said how would I check for squareness you know I've got a I've got a square block and I've got maybe a cylinder square and those are good for doing visuals but how would I comparatively actually measure something and get a number I mean holding something up against hold a block you think is square up against a block I mean shine a flashlight behind it and you're getting a visual but now we want to see an actual number and see how far out of square it is so all you need and you this is just something that you slap together you don't have to drill or mill or do any work you just have to put it together you need a steel block that's flat on the bottom and one good surface doesn't even have to be squared just needs to have one nice flat surface it could be a milled surface or whatever and it doesn't have to be square in any direction as long as you use it something to slide around the table nicely you need a small Noga with a fine adjust this was the f80 version which is fine adjust top they got a fat and a fab finally just bottom and finally just talk but that's a topic just you need an indicator tenths would be better if you're trying to measure precisely and then you need it an old dead end mill this is an end mill shank that's been miked I might I might come 90 degrees apart at both ends so I know it's very round and it's very straight so Mike this way Mike this way come over here Mike this way Mike this way so rotate your Mike's 90 degrees make sure it's it's very round and very straight if it's not does this will throw your measurements off but let me get all this put together these four things let me get these things put together and now we're just going to check us out a one two three blocks and you know check them for square and we're going to use the angle block here to calibrate and then we're gonna move on to the to the square blocks and check them comparatively all right so let me get this put together and I'll show you the setup and how to do it this is totally low-budget but everyone's got this stuff in their shop so you don't need a fancy squareness comparator you don't need a square master you can even do it comparatively without an angle block but let's put this together and we'll go from there okay and I got this thing all set up and like I say it's just a steel block with a Noga mag down to it back here he needs to be big enough for the arm can go back and back over to here and we're gonna be measuring off of this face right here but we don't want to be butting up against a a flat surface here is where your round rod comes in you drop your rod right here our granite block and bring it into there just for a little rod makes contact there okay I'm gonna bring you out here so you can see that and you know hoping you can see we're on zero okay so I'm gonna move this away and I'm gonna bring back my test piece and bring it in right there we're a tenth high so for all intents and purposes if I flip it on this way I should be a tenth low which we are at tenth low so that tells me that this block is one tenth out of square now let's pretend we didn't even have this you know we don't even have a square block but we want to check for squareness let's grab this other one two three this is good that we kind of started over with this block of this unknown block all right we're gonna go get right on zero there then we're going to rotate the block 180 degrees check the other side so that's two tenths low so we're gonna split the difference and make it 1/10 low and then for all intents and purposes when I come back here it's gonna be 1/10 high so we've split the difference between the two there's your 1/10 high so this block is out of square it's going to be called plus or minus 1/10 because we've got a negative error and we've got a positive error and they're opposing we put zero right in the center we split the difference above and below zero so this block is classified as plus or minus 1/10 out of square over this three-inch because we're measuring this is a 1-2-3 block we're measuring three inches high so that's how this would be classified and you can use this in any direction we're doing it in the hard direction here but even if you don't have an angle block to calibrate your comparator you can still do you can still do the 180 flips and establish your zero point split the difference and then you know how far your block is and what the tolerance is on your block this is the next level passed doing a visual on either cylinder square or on the block or on an angle square or something like that but that's a good way to check comparatively how far our block is out of square with just what you got laying around the shop there's this is nothing special here all right guys I hope this helps and I hope the person that asked me the question I hope this helps you Merry Christmas this is a Christmas Eve and I just thought I'd come out and shoot this rule this little quickie alright guys we'll talk to you later

Channel: Shadon HKW

Views: 20,435

Rating: 4.9774647 out of 5

Keywords: surface plate, squareness

Id: pY3TNiabb3A

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2015