Speed Square Basics - For Non Carpenters

hey everyone it is mike the dad nerd here and today we are going to be covering the top reasons why everyone needs a speed square now if you're anything like me i became a homeowner and someone gifted me a speed square and i had never used one before so i had no idea what i would be using this for in future projects but ever since then you know my wife and i became homeowners a few years ago this has been the most invaluable tool in my garage i use it all the time on every single project i do so what i'm going to show you today is kind of the top reasons why everyone should own a speed square so let's sit down and take a look at some of its uses all right so if you haven't seen a speed square before these things are used by carpenters all the time and they've got all sorts of handy measurements that are on them but you know a lot of us aren't carpenters we're just you know people doing normal projects and so a lot of the times we don't need a lot of the measurements on here but there's a lot of things about this you'll look that there's a lip on this side the most basic thing that speed square can do is make a nice square for you so you got this piece of wood you shove it up against there and uh you draw your line and there you go you got a square line right you can make your make your square cuts and so that is great and also obviously you've got your 45 degree angle here but what a lot of people don't know is that these have pivot points so you'll see that there's a pivot point which is going to be right down at the bottom i think if i flip it over here it actually shows yep there it is pivot point on the bottom i'm left-handed though so i switch it over here and what this allows you to do is to do angles so from your right angle here you'll notice that along this side is your degrees of the different angles you would need so what you can do is let's say we want a 20 degree angle from this line so let's actually go back up to that line and you want 20 degrees you just pivot it on its pivot point until we see that 20 degrees is lined up right here so there's 20 degree mark you make your line and there you go there is a 20 degree angle from your square line so it can be used to find all your angles that you need which is a fantastic tool now the other thing there's two more things i'll show you here is it has scribe lines now scribe lines are great for multiple uh reasons and you might need them but on this speed square from one inch to two and a half inch every quarter inch it's going to give you a scribe line so let's say you need a line here you just put your pin there and just drag the speed square along and there's your scribe line perfectly straight you know it's going to be square to the bottom just stick your pen right in there and drag it along and you can use the scribe line now here's one more a little bit more advanced thing so let's say you need to find the center of this board between these two ends so you need to find the center and if we look there you know looks about to be three and a half and maybe i can't do that math in my head let's pretend you have a board here that's kind of an odd measurement and you can't do the math in your head on where the center line is well this is pretty easy all you do is you pivot it on its pivot point again until you get a number that you know the halfway of so we know that halfway of four is two right so let's go here see how the four is perfectly lined up there let's draw the line and let's mark it at two so you know two is half of four boom done then all you do take your speed square line it up on this side right on the top and there you go there's your center you found your center uh so really helpful for finding center on a you know an odd measurement of board that you just can't do that calculation quick in your head and this is actually even easier and foolproof and you won't need to be questioning the math that you are doing in your head alright so hopefully those reasons were enough to convince you that you need a speed square everyone in your life needs a speed square you should be gifting speed squares but you know what in case that wasn't enough there's still uh one reason i didn't quite mention it makes a great bottle opener if you're ever needing one enjoy

Channel: TheDadNerd

Views: 151,238

Keywords: carpenter, speed square, home owner, woodworking, saw, measure, top 5

Id: fSe1ELEK1CM

Length: 4min 4sec (244 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020