HOW TO USE AN ANGLE FINDER

hey guys welcome back to calibrate tools now when you're working on a project that requires you to find the angle of a slope you don't want to be off by too many degrees because that can throw the whole project off so to avoid that we have tools like angle finders so hit that like and subscribe button stick around we'll find out how they work and i'll see you in a sec [Music] okay guys i put together four different types of angle finders here so you can get familiar with you know what's out there on the market okay so here the first one we have a regular analog angle finder and that simply means you know it's analog it's not digital there's no lcd screen that displays numbers automatically it has a protractor on it and if you remember what a protractor is you know you remember that from school in geometry class it's simply a uh semicircle usually zero to 180 degrees okay and back zero to 180 degrees both ways um that helps you find the angles or degrees of an angle okay guys let's take a closer look at the protractor and all these numbers on the dial so we can understand what's going on so if you look at the outermost periphery of the protractor you have 0 to 180 all the way around to 180 and that's from right to left okay and then if you go down to this inner row you have zero all the way around 180 degrees again and that's from left to right well why is that well they configured it this way depending on where the angle opens up in reference to 90 degrees okay guys so if it's been a while since you took geometry i know it has been for me and we need to know what an angle is and how that's defined let's go ahead and do that right now before we go any further okay so an angle is simply the intersection of two lines at a point called vertex okay so if we look at this material in front of us we see one line going this way and one line coming down that way and they intersect right here and that's called the vertex okay now it's very important to note that we're not dealing with two dimensions all the time when we're out there working in a three-dimensional world building three-dimensional things you know in the construction world in the diy world and so forth with that said there's the outer portion of the angle that can be measured and there's also the inner portion that can be measured now if we look at this piece of wood here we notice that it's in the shape of a trapezoid and if you remember from geometry class that's what this shape is right you have two obtuse angles and two acute angles now what is an obtuse angle an obtuse angle is greater than 90 degrees and that would be these two on top here the acute angles means that it's less than 90 degrees and that would be these two right here on the bottom right and left side okay so how do we get an accurate measurement of all four of those angles on this three-dimensional piece of material here that's where these two rows on the protractor the one on the outside and the one on the inside come into play so let's see how that works now angle finders uh are not the same as protractors that you would use in school right because angle finders have levers and they could have other moving parts that may not allow it to orient on a piece of material like a regular protractor would so we're not going to talk about how to use a protractor to measure these materials a regular protractor to measure these materials because you can't do that with a regular protractor all the time but an angle finder can measure different types of material and different angles you know with ease okay so here we go the first thing you want to know as we discussed before is where the vertex is on your material on the angle that you want to measure on the on the material you have so if we're going to measure this angle here on this piece of wood where's the vertex remember a vertex is where two lines meet right so if you have this line and this line guess what this is this point right here that's where they meet and that's called the vertex so you want to take the vertex which is this and place it as close to the pivot or vertex of the angle finder okay like that and then you simply take the angle finder and bring it down like that on your material and it should take the measurement now we know this is an acute angle so it's less than 90 degrees so when we look on the angle finder we're not looking for something greater than 90 degrees we're looking for something less and that would be on the inner row where it landed right here and that says that's about you know a little over 50 degrees okay okay so we measured this angle right here and we came out to about a little over 50 degrees right and we knew this was an angle that was less than 90 degrees and you can tell just by looking at it right so another way to do that is where's the base of the angle the base of the angle if you're looking down on this piece of material would be right here right and you know 90 degrees is straight up like that so you know if it's to the right of 90 degrees on a regular protractor it would be less than 90 degrees and that's how we know just by looking at it is less than 90 degrees but you know if you're familiar with angles you know just by looking at them you can tell they're if they're greater or less than 90 degrees so the next angle we're going to measure is this one right here and just by looking at that one you can tell that it's greater than 90 degrees okay so where's the vertex on this angle right here well i just tapped on it it's this right here so what did we do before we placed the vertex as close to the vertex of the angle finder as we could right so this is what you do you take your vertex of your material and you try to get it as close to the vertex of the angle finder and there you go so we know just by looking at it that it's greater than 90 degrees alright so we don't want to look for anything on the scale that's less than 90 degrees so if we look at the scale we see that the outer periphery is less than 90. so that can't be the scale that we want to look at we want to look at the inner scale and as you can see there it's about 135 degrees now i know some of you guys are saying well if this is a true trapezoid then that obtuse angle that you measured at 135 degrees and this acute angle that you measured at over 50 degrees equal over 180 degrees and that can't be true for a true trapezoid and you know what you're right but guess what this is a uh a piece of wood that i got off of some couch feet and i was just using it as an example it's not perfect it's not shaved or machined to tolerances that are beyond belief okay so uh just give me a break there thanks okay so so far we've measured uh angles on this piece of material right here and this can be considered uh an outside angle measurement right because it's on the outside of material but what if you have something like this where the angle is on the inside of the material how do you measure that with the angle finder you know so say if you're going to measure uh a corner you know i'm saying in a house or something like that that would be an inside angle and uh this is how you use the angle finder to measure those this particular angle finder here in order to measure an inside angle you would turn it like that pull it out take your inside angle place it place the angle finder and make sure that each arm is flush with each side of the angle and that's how you measure it in this case obviously this is a 90 degree angle and you can see that it measures about 90 degrees on the angle finder okay so let's talk about some of the other angle finders i showed you guys earlier this is the digital angle finder here and it's not as uh acrobatic as the last angle finder the analog one i just showed you guys it's pretty simple you just turn it on at zero degrees okay now let me turn it over since it seems to be backwards or something so it's on zero degrees as you can see and uh you simply you know take your angle that you want to measure and say if it's the outside angle of this piece of material and you have about 91 degrees okay it's about 90 degrees but like i said this these pieces of wood that i brought they're not perfect here and uh so you're not gonna get an exact 90 degrees but it's it's about 90 degrees and you can do the same for the inner angle the inside angle which should be about the same about 90 degrees and there you go now this is a stainless steel angle finder or a machinist's protractor okay and again it's not as acrobatic as the first angle finder and it's pretty simple to use okay you see that it has uh like the first protractor and analog dial uh on its surface and uh say for instance you want to scribe an angle you can turn it to the angle you want to scribe say for instance you turn it to uh on the dial you turn it to 120 degrees okay so you tighten the knob and that's on the that's 120 degrees on the inner circle right so you tighten the knob place it on your your surface say a piece of wood in this instance you take a pen or pencil and grab a line right there now you can cut a uh 120 degree angle turn it over that's about 120 degrees and you can also use it to measure angles as well so as you can see this is an outside angle of this piece of material and just by looking at it you can tell that it's less than 90 degrees right this is the vertex and you can tell it's less than 90 degrees so you take your finder here there you go and what do we have here we know it's less than 90. so we don't want to look for anything over 90 degrees so that's about if you look at the inner circle and where this lands that's a little over 75 degrees okay and lastly we have the digital sliding t-bevel and as you can see this is the sliding portion simply loosen that knob and here we have the sliding portion of it okay you can use the sliding portion for uh you know molding and trim and so forth so the great thing about this device it has a few functions first of all as you can see right here it says zero degrees on the display there and we know that that's not zero degrees right so great thing about that is you can set the uh zero degrees on it so you just find a flat surface let's take this for instance and you flatten it out like that and then you press zero let go and it uh it's at zero degrees now right so that should be pretty accurate and it is you know once again it's a digital uh angle finder like the uh previous one we looked at so you just simply if you want to measure the inside angle of this piece of material you get about 90 degrees right same with the outside angle around 90 degrees and once again we know that this piece of material is not perfect so you're not going to get a perfect uh reading there of 90 degrees but it's just about 90 degrees okay another good thing about this device is that you can see uh let's let's turn it to an another angle other than 90 degrees here you have 118 degrees on here now if you press reverse you can see the balance of that okay so that that would equal 180 degrees see that you press reverse and you can see 118 you see the other the other half of that angle will be displayed when you press reverse so you can see each half of of the angle so another great thing about the sliding t-bevel the digital sliding t-bevel is that you can actually store information in it right so let's just say uh you're running from one rafter to the next or you got to go to the bathroom right so let's turn this uh to an angle right that's about 80 degrees and you want to store that because you got to go to the bathroom just press hold and it's stored right so even if you move this it's not going anywhere right t bevels are also great for scribing right so let's just say you want to scribe that angle you know you tighten the knob place it on the edge take your pen a pencil there you go now i know you guys learned how useful angle finders can be so if you like what you saw hit that like and subscribe button and i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Caliber8 Tools & DIY

Views: 188,978

Keywords: best angle finders, angle finders for crown molding, right angle finderscope, angle finder how to use, how to use an empire angle finder, how to use an angle finder for wood, how to use an angle finder youtube, Caliber8 Tools how to, Exactac Picture Hanging Tool, how to measure angles with a protractor, how to measure angles for cutting wood, how to measure angles with a speed square, how to measure angles for baseboard trim, obtuse and acute, digital sliding t-bevel/angle finder

Id: ga6M91mPhB4

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020