How To True Up A Combination Square The Simple Way AND Tune It Up To Make It Work Better For You

what's going on guys I'm Jody this is inspire woodcraft but some of you know I'm a bit limited on how much I can film and how you know professionally done I can actually make these videos now with the unfortunate circumstances of the world lately and so I'm gonna do the best I came here to explain to you guys how to check combination squares for square how to dial them in and get them square once you you know figure out what your readings are and then of course how to tune these up a little bit so we get a little bit better service life out of them now I'm going to throw a lot of information out here and hopefully a bit of a quick time and so I'm gonna have to maybe skip on a few details details which some of you guys really really liked and some of you guys really really hate if you needed a detail that you didn't quite hear in the video leave a comment ask a question and I will be sure to keep an eye on those comments so that I can help you guys out when needed now checking a combination square for square requires basically the combination square a pencil or for real good precision you could use a marking knife I'm not going to use a marking knife because it's really hard to pick up on camera I am gonna be using a pencil but if you needed absolute precision out of this a marking knife would be your best bet you're also going to need some sort of something to reference this off of if you're using a 12 inch combination square you're gonna want a reference off a board that's going to be able to give you the length of your ruler or fully extended on a 12 inch combination square it's gonna be like roughly 9 and 3/4 inch of material okay so you can use a board like that if for you were using say a six inch combination Square which is a very popular option you could get away with something quite a bit more narrow what do we use for material to check it doesn't really matter a lot of people will say to use the factory edge of a piece of plywood I don't necessarily disagree but I will say check the quality of your plywood ahead of time common exterior-grade plywood although they'll all have that same factory edge they're going to be a lot rougher not only on the faces but they're going to be a lot rougher on that factory edge when it comes to a tool like this where you're asking it to be a lot more precise you're going to want the you reference against to be a lot more precise when you're checking this Foursquare so just be mindful of that if you're using a piece of you know a larger wider board like that piece of pine make sure that you run it through a joiner run it through a table saw with some sort of jig that makes you have a nice join it edge on it same with a piece of plywood whatever it is you want to make sure that that edge is nice and jointed and preferably smooth it doesn't have anything sticking out of it no dust or dirt or anything like that I know some of this is common sense but they're things that get brought up so I think a finished grade plywood is gonna be your best bet or whatever you do just make sure that it has a nice smooth true edge on it now check these literally the only thing you have to do I like to extend the ruler all the way until this bottom corner sort of starts to go into the head itself so it looks something like that okay and then I tighten it down I bring it down to my material once I have it down to my material here I want to make sure that this head is pushed all the way up against my jointed edge this way but I also want to make sure that my ruler is all the way flat here one of the things that can happen with these is that you can have a bent ruler at least especially with our lower end tools okay so if this ruler is bent and I go to set it down here on my piece of plywood if this ruler is bent up that means my pencil or my knife is gonna slide under this ruler and then come back out where it's touching that's gonna give me a goofy reading when I flip it over the office it's gonna happen I'm gonna be okay here but when I get to here this is gonna be like a hump and my pencil over my knife or it's gonna slide underneath there and then come back out again giving me a goofy reading so I want to make sure that I'm pushed all the way tight up against here and all the way down here I'm going to take in this case a pencil I'm gonna make sure that I'm not flicking it out I'm not you know changing the angle of my hand and getting a goofy reading I'm gonna leave my hand in the same position just draw a nice hopefully straight line I'm gonna flip it over like this what I like to do is I like to then just slide it forward until that entire line just barely disappears okay tight up against the joint at edge make sure my whole ruler is nice and flat and same thing I'm gonna come in here nice straight even line if I slide this over I should notice if there's a difference between this end and this end okay and in this one we can tell that this has these two are a little closer together this distance is a little farther apart that means that this part of my ruler needs to come double-check make sure I'm right here this end needs to come in this way okay so how do we do that well you take apart a combination square if you look down into this groove here okay let's say that where the clamp bolt is is sort of the pivot point and a teeter totter okay there's two pads inside that groove they're cast into the head removing material from one of those heads is going to mean that you're sort of pivoting in a way your ruler one way or another keep in mind you can't build material back up you can only take material away that means you have to be really careful when you tune these things up or else you're going to remove so much material so quickly that there's not going to be any material left to remove and your tools gonna be basically useless okay so I like to figure out which direction okay does this ruler need to come in or out and then what I will do is I will draw a arrow right here saying that side needs to go down okay what's really nice about using pencil on these as I can get in here and just erase that and then when I go to use of this tool again after it's been all squared up I don't have any markings on here there's nothing permanent and then when I need to square it up again down the road I can just remark that the same as I did the first time now there's a few different ways you can remove material from those little pads that are inside of there the most sort of complicated way and it's not so complicated as much as that most people don't have all the tools necessary for things needle files or jewelers files is something that's a nice luxury to have a lot of people probably don't have them laying around but you can get a file they're small enough to slide inside of here and remove material from either one of these paths depending on which way the roller needs to go again remove a little bit of material put the square all back together check it the same way you did before on that nice jointed edge see what needs to happen if your lines are starting to come closer together you have sort of an idea for how much material to remove but you can also check and see how quickly you're getting back to square if you don't have Jewelers files or needle files laying around a simple piece of sandpaper will do the trick as well you can feel comfortable going up with the coarser grits they're gonna remove material quicker of course but again you just have to be careful I even just use these disks type that we all have I fold it in half that's just big enough to slide it down in that hole and just sort of drag out some material so you can get it down in there and drag out material if it's thin enough you can actually sort of file away at that okay it's a little awkward but it'll get the job done one of the things that makes these inherently go out of square is the exact thing that's going to help us make it be square this is the absolute easiest way to make this thing square again this is aluminum this is stainless steel this is way harder than the aluminum meaning that I can actually just take the edge of this drop it down in there okay I'm not actually hooking it up to the clamp bolt I'm actually just sliding that corner and using it almost like a file or a chisel to scrape away the material on the pad on this side okay I'm gonna take just a little bit out and maybe knock it on here and blow out the shavings okay I'm gonna put it back together tighten it up check it for square and see what I need to do again I can't stress enough go a little bit at a time or else you're just gonna whittle this down to nothing now if you have a more higher-end tool one that has either a hard under a cast iron head you're going to probably need files because this ruler isn't gonna be strong enough to actually dig the material away but it's also one of the things that makes a higher-end tool worth it so now we know how to check them for square we know how to get them square but what about all the other sort of inherent lower standard things that come with a lower end tool how do we sort of this thing up to make it work for us a little bit longer and have a longer lifespan well the very thing that we just did to remove material with the blade itself is kind of one of the reasons why these things fall out of squares so much because every time you dig this thing in you jam it in and you look for that groove there and you go to tighten it down every time you take the ruler in and out every time you slide it you're removing a little bit of material potentially depending on how rough this edge is so my recommendation is to actually take this rule out and sort of doctor this rule up to begin with and you go to a higher-end tool you'll notice that the ruler itself the edges are a lot smoother they're not necessarily rounded over but they're eased some of that has to do with the finish a lot of it has to do with the machining process itself when you buy a higher-end tool you can do the exact same thing with these these are very sharp on the corners what happens is is as you go those sharp corners especially on a bent ruler will grab into your material if you think about it if this ruler is bent and the edges are sharp and I have a hump in the middle here it's going to be grabbing here and here and sort of cutting into the material as I go not enough to tear it up not enough to cause any tear out but just enough to grab a little bit and make this tool sort of a pain in the butt when I go to use it so let's try and check the bend of this ruler unless ease these edges easiest thing to do honestly you could just use some sandpaper you want to make sure you do it to the entire length of the ruler just take your time don't overdo it you're not trying to completely round over the edge you're just trying to knock down that sharp edge that's on there you could also use a file as long as you're careful with a file and you don't go absolutely crazy and end up mangling the whole ruler itself another thing you might want to check is actually the edges the corners of the ruler itself now I'm going to tell you you want to be mindful of how much material take from these edges because the idea is is with these rulers you want the edge to be an absolute zero point and any graduations past that zero point to be accurate in relation to that zero point so if I come back to the one-inch mark I want to exactly one inch from the end of that ruler so you don't want to really manipulate the end of this much but there's no reason why you can't take and sort of just round over these corners just a little tiny bit just enough so that when you go and slide this into the body and you are fooling around trying to get to that thing you're not digging into those paths that we use to adjust this to begin with therefore remove you know material and making this thing fall out of square unintentionally another thing you could do is you could come through here and you can sort of take some sandpaper or something and just sort of polish this edge up a little bit I think if you're going to spend so much time absolutely doctoring this thing up you might just want to get a higher end toll to begin with but again to each their own there are little things that you can do to make this thing work for you now I thought I was the only one that had this issue but I saw a commenter the other day that said that one of the reference points on his combination Square wasn't even flat to begin with that it didn't even come that way okay this is my six-inch one the bottom reference here on the head the 90-degree reference actually has a twist in it and it's not just the face here it's actually this whole bottom section okay so when you sight down it like this it actually has this warp to it how do you go about fixing that well what I do what I did for this one is I have a six inch jointer I put some sandpaper down on the bed of the jointer and I took this out okay so we'll take the knob completely off we'll take the spring out and we'll take the pin out the the clamp bolt excuse me okay and I have the jointer bed I have the fence itself so long as these are 90 degrees you can then take this you can push this up against the fence side with some sandpaper down here on the bottom okay right up against this corner pushing down into the corner if you will those of you with joiners know what I'm talking about and you can actually slowly just run this back and forth on that sandpaper and that will reference off of this face and bring this into a 90 degree reference from the side if that makes sense it'll you'll basically be mimicking this 90-degree mark so it's going to flatten it out and it's gonna pull it in to 90 degrees oh if you don't have a jointer well you can use a table saw it's so long as your table itself is 90 degrees in reference to the fence you could also use a miter saw miter saws back fence should be 90 degrees to the table the same thing can apply to a bandsaw if you don't have any of those things you can simply make a jig to do this in take two pieces of wood you might have to glue clamp these something so long as this is 90 degrees if it's 90 degrees on the inside here you're gonna be fine let that dry up whatever you have to do put some sandpaper in here at the bottom holding this up against the fence and down just keep going another thing you can do to check on your work those of you that have hemp lanes know what I'm gonna do here take a sharpie just draw some marks right along the edge of this here and what that'll do is as you sharpen it the sharpen start to go away on the places that you've sanded and it's going to make it easier to check how far you've gone what your progress is after that this thing will be nice and flat it'll be 90 degrees to the side now as far as checking the 45 degree goes you're gonna have to have an already known 45 degree reference so whether that be a mitre square whether it be another combination square that you know is true and you're going to have to keep whittling that side away until you get it to the accurate degree there sorry the other thing that you're gonna want to do after you get this completely dialed up is you're gonna want to recheck this for square because you took material from here and/or here that means that this is probably not any longer working in a 90 degree fashion with those pads anymore so you're just going to want to check it for square real quick but as we saw earlier that's really easy and quick to fix now if you've absolutely just fed up with basically everything I just said in this video and you want to spend a little money to get a higher quality tool I recently as some of you know and are probably tired of hearing me say bought this p ec model p ec is for manufacturing parts pieces full kits of combinational squares for other major companies as well very high quality product but I got this as a blemished tool that means that cause medically it may not be a hundred percent might have a scratch and the finish in my case I have or is it at these two little corners look like they're kind of been you know nicked almost does not affect quality of the tool it arrived completely square completely precise I absolutely love this thing I was able to still get it in the configuration that I want in fact this one I got with the protractor head and the center head as well and I probably saved myself about a hundred dollars by buying a blemish tool granted I got it on sale on top of that but it sure beats buying this at full price but now I have a very high quality higher-end tool but I saved myself some money in the process so I will leave links to this in the description I'll leave a link for a unblemished one so you guys can see sort of the price difference but I'll also leave links for the two piece kit that's a square head and the ruler and also the four piece kit like I showed you guys before I personally am I appoint my wife highly recommend checking these out upgrading getting away from the lower end stuff if you need to if you don't need to if this stuff is fine for you if you don't mind tweaking it once in a while there's a lot of knowledge to be at about how to even square these up to begin with instead of just throwing stuff away and getting new ones but if that's ok with you definitely worth what you bought to begin with but if you want to upgrade definitely recommend checking these out like I say guys if I left something out if I stumbled a little bit too much or something like that let me know things are getting a little weird in the world so filming is definitely a challenge for me anyways thanks so much for watching this video as always you guys I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Inspire Woodcraft

Views: 174,591

Rating: 4.876369 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: bCxIg1lQ8pw

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020