Super easy method to find miter angles using a bevel gauge, speed square or protractor.

hi welcome back to my channel how to chris here thanks for joining me again today so how do we use these tools here a protractor a bevel gauge or a speed square to find out what an angle is well i'm going to show that today i'm also going to show how to find out the angle in degrees so that you can transfer it over to your miter saw now the degrees we find here is going to be different than on the miter saw so we're going to do a quick calculation and then we'll be able to take that degree we have here and set our miter saw to that right the right number so if you don't know how to transfer the number from an actual angle to a mitered angle then you can just take your tool which would be the bevel gauge for example line it up on your angle bring this over to the saw line up the blade and then you wouldn't need to know what the degrees are but if you want to know because we're going to give some examples let's say you have a drawing here and you need to know what this is you want to know what this point this measurement is in degrees you want to write it down so you can have it on your plan for your custom drawing your custom project for example so you need to indicate degrees so how do i get a degree in here well what i do is the other reason i want the degrees is i want to be able to bisect this angle i'm going to show that as well bisect the angle is so i can get these two to fit up so if this was a piece of base i'm going to need them to fit together so we're basically going to get these we're going to get this degree then we're going to split it in half but first let's how do we get that how do we get this in degrees well you're going to set your bevel gauge up as one way to that angle i have it set here already so if it wasn't set let's say it's out of whack i put it in place line it up to that mark or you would also just put it against the corner of that you want to find after we did that i'm going to show now how to get the angle in degrees some bevel gauges have it in degrees this doesn't so i'm going to use uh i'm going to show how to get that with the speed square first then the protractor so the speed square has the pivot point here it says zero and opposite that it says here degrees so we're just going to put the speed uh the bevel gauge on the speed square line it up like this hold it flush on the bottom at zero and go across and we're gonna see that it's what we have here we have 40 45 50 55 and it hits on 60. so this blade is touching 60. so we have 60 degrees let's write that down so now we found out this is 60 degrees in here so this is a 60 degree angle now protractor similar idea this is the 180 degree part this is the center we're going to line this up go either way line it up here and we can see that we have 40 50 and 60 right here so that's how we did that protractor and speed square now now that we have the number we can't just take this number and go over to the miter saw because the numbers on the miter saw are not going to be the same as this it's not going to 60 degrees has to be changed to work with a miter saw because it's set up it's dialed in differently and i'll go into a lot of detail on that part later but let's just get to how to get this to transfer over to the miter saw well we take this we first we have to take 90 degrees in every case you're going to take 90 degrees no matter what number you have here you're going to take 90 degrees and you're going to subtract whatever angle you have so we have 60. 60 degrees here subtract it we come up with 30 degrees so now this is the magic number here this is called a miter angle miter angle and this is the proper angle to cut with your miter saw so we take the 60 and that became 30. so let's go over to the miter saw got that here and let's get that set up so this is the saw this is the base of the saw this is the fence to take my bevel gauge we had determined that 60 we had it set on 60 degrees we determine that with the uh with the protractor and the uh speed square so if we put that on on the fence and we line it up to where the blade would come down so this is where the blade would come down it lines up we line it up and then if we look at the the indications here the numbers we have we could see it's actually on 30 degrees so it's not 60 degrees it's 30 degrees it's that magic number we talked about that miter angle so 60 became 30. so now we're all set we can lock the saw in and make our cut now that's going to get our angle that we need okay so if we're just cutting an angle that's what we cut it but if we want to make two boards line up one here and one here and we want it to bisect in the middle just like this then we're going to need to split this number in half and that's pretty simple half of that would be 15 degrees so we'll have we'll cut this board and this board at 50 15 degrees so let's draw out real quick what a piece of molding would look like on here so let's just say i had a base molding here and i wanted to fit here this is the corner and i want it to fit nice and tight so i want the same angle okay so here we're going to cut now we're going to cut this at 15 degrees and this one is also going to be 15 degrees because they're going to both add up and equal this magic number here which is the 30 degrees so that's all there is to it now okay so now there is another way of getting this 30 degrees so if we don't do it this way which is subtract the actual angle from 90 degrees and come up with the miter angle that way what we can do is you can use what's called a miter saw angle chart and that looks like this and what's handy about this is you can you can go up here and see where your actual angle is and ours is 60 in this this uh example so what we do is you just go across and then here would be that magic number we talked about 30 degrees so you can use a miter saw angle chart to simplify it but without this you could still do it get that angle on the bevel gauge put it onto the speed square for example and then after it's on the speed square just subtract it from 90. always subtract it from 90 degrees it's going to give you your miter angle and then from there don't forget to bisect that angle basically just means split that angle in half this way you can join up two pieces and so i also wanted to show how to get an angle without using a bevel gauge so you can do that just by using the speed square or protractor directly on the material so let's start with the protractor on a drawing we're just going to line it up and this center mark to the center of the angle here the point and this horizontal with the horizontal part of the angle line it up and that's going to give us these 60 degrees as well we're going to follow it right across 60 degrees can we do that with a speed square on a piece of wood so if we have a piece of wood we have an angle marked on it to find it without using a bevel gauge you just put the speed square sit it on the speed square this is the point which says pivot opposite that over on these numbers says degrees follow it across it's going to give us a 60 degrees as well so you can definitely do that with your speed square or your protractor directly on the piece without even using the bevel gauge the bevel gauge is nice because you can take a quick angle reading and then you can walk over to your miter saw line up the blade and cut it and so there's different reasons for using the tools but i wanted to show that you can get the angles with all these tools with or without certain ones and how to get the work piece cut now don't forget to bisect these angles now so we had the 60 degrees now we have to take the 90 again subtract 60 it's going to give us 30. that's the mitered angle we have to split this in half so you have to divide that by two it's going to give us 15. 15 on each side is going to be the bisected angle you

Channel: HowToChris

Views: 17,704

Keywords: DIY, how to, tutorials, easy understanding, home improvement, skills, esential skills

Id: CAuJDDiaN-0

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022