The basics on a Speed square

hey everybody welcome back from classic work today we're going to talk about one of the most universal pieces of equipment that you can own is a speed square we'll talk about some of the simple things about a speed square its main purpose is to lay out lines very very quickly and very efficiently and accurately so the first thing since it's a square it's made to bump up to the edge of workpiece and scribe a 90 degree line to one edge now another thing that you can do with the speed square is it has this long 45-degree leg on it and it's the same process you can bump it up to the edge of the workpiece and scribe a 45-degree line off this edge another cool thing that you can do with the speed square is this guy to built in quarter inch increments for ripping stock you can pick one of those slots say if you want to cut two inches off of the board you would get to the two inch slot and drag your pencil and the square down and you'd have a two inch line from the outside of your board another great thing about the speed square is it's also a protractor if you see all these numbers here on the side of the square - to use the protractor what you have to do is is on all squares they have what's known as a it says pivot on the top side it's got a arrow pointing to the corner to use it you're going to pick a edge that you're going to bump it up to and holding the square real firmly you're going to pivot the square in any direction and hold it to wherever you want that that line to be say if we wanted one 45 degrees I'm going to try to draw a parallel to this one you'll read on this side of the protractor - 45 degrees and just put that mark right there on the edge of the line of the board and then you'll scribe your line and there's your 45 degrees the great thing about the protractor is it can do any degree from one two ninety another great thing about the square and a lot of people don't know this unless your professional contractor is what are all these numbers for yeah common up here and then you have hip value right here the common stands for your common rafter lengths on pitches of roofs and the hip value stands for the hips and valleys that you have in a roof and those rafters have to be cut a certain way I'm going to teach you everything that I know about all the common okay we got a little model here of a rafter and for demonstration purposes let's just say that the tail of the rafter down here uh maybe a squirrel got into it and eight side of it off and your face is falling down and it just you know looks bad and you need to patch this so you need a small section of rafter here to scab back on the side so you got something to mount your fascia to so on this model here if you do not know the pitch of the roof which is you've got to know that to cut these one really cool trick that you can do with the speed square is take you a speed square and a plumb bob and come up to the roof of your building and take the plumb bob and put it right there through the pivot that we used earlier for the pro chart protractor now make sure that your plumb bob is not hitting anything and that's you know it's moving freely it's kind of close quarters here but what you want to do is is come and look where your line is going through the protractor numbers here now from what I'm reading is it's about thirty two that's about thirty two right on now from that this is what can do take a look at your square and here's 32 right here if you count the number of degrees from the center point which is 45 to the 32 it will give you your picture your roof check this out you have 45 to 40 is 5 10 32 so we have 10 11 12 13 degrees okay come back here to the end of your square and count 13 degrees to find your pitch so what you're going to do is we're right here at 10 11 12 13 now it's really hard to see because you don't have a board coming up through the side but if you lay your square down simply get a good look at this if you lay your square down and go to 13 degrees you notice that your common rafter is 3 and that's our pitch is a 1 to 3 ratio so now we know that we can cut our rafter okay now we can do our layout for our rafter I've determined that we're going to come up 5 inches from the back here from the tail and Mark a line take your speed square and extend that line about an inch and where you can see it real clearly now to cut the seat cut which in the previous rafter that's what set on the wall to keep the rafter from sliding off the roof and to give enough surface area to nail the rafter to the roof we're going to do we're going to cut what's known as the seat cut or some people call it a bird's mouth all right what you're going to do is take your square and put it right there on that line that we just did and get over here so you can see we're going to take the square and put it back to what we said our common was which is three so you line the edge of the board right here if you can see it in the middle to that three and scribe your line one and a half inches which is a two by four and put you a big ol arrow there so you don't get confused then you're going to take your square turn it over and put that square right there on that line that you drew and also excuse me a second and also to that inch and a half mark you made and now you're going to put a 90-degree line from this birds mouth seat just roll it all the way down the side okay and that's the angle that you're going to cut for your bird's mouth now up here on the ridge you're going to do the exact same thing set this time is you're going to take your square and put it on the other half of it and turn it let's turn it two three on your common and then scribe your line which I've already done now this way you know that this line right here and the bird's mouth seat right here or parallel to each other and that's critical whenever you're making these these cuts because roof needs to be very straight all right we're going to cut this and see how it fits okay now we're going to check the fit that we just cut and see how close we are all right don't get much better than that folks pretty simple stuff to do it's it's pretty amazing what you can do with basic tools and just a little bit of know-how you can move mountains alright y'all take care from classic work see you next time you

Channel: Classic Work

Views: 6,787,420

Rating: 4.8353429 out of 5

Keywords: Speed Square, fast, easy, cool, tool, layout

Id: yPL6jOa6AH8

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/DayDreaminBoy]

mike judge needs to make a home improvement show with hank hill doing all of the tutorials... i would watch the shit out of that show.

[u/PermanentDingleberry]

I can't believe I just had my mind blown by a speed square. That was a great video, very informative.

[u/HeIsntMe]

I had no idea. Now I want to build a house.

[u/no_sissies_allowed]

This was very helpful. I got one for Christmas this year, but I didn't really know what all it could be used for (other than giving me nice straight lines).

Thanks for the share!

[u/Ringsy]

This is really the sort of content that should be in this sub!

Well done :)

[u/Acthinian]

This is a good tutorial, however I think that it might make the concept a little easier to explain the pitch that he touches on near the end. He calls the pitch a 1:3 ratio which doesn't explain (IMO) the pitch very well. I always called it by the roof pitch, which in his example is a 3:12 pitch, which translates to 3" of rise for every 12" of run. There are a ton of other ways to use this square expecially when building hips and valleys. Because the Hip runs at a 45deg. angle from the center ridge line to the corner. The hip value would always run at a 3:17 which is 3 inches of rise over 17" of run. which if you put it on that handy little hip line was correct every time. This is a great reference Swanson Speed Square to show all of the uses with the speed square, especially when it come to cutting "birds mouth" cuts and even "seat cut" rafters.

[u/vettehp]

As a carpenter for 40 years I can tell you this guy needs to go back and read his book he got with his speed square. While I agree that it is an invaluable tool this guy has no idea how to use one, first its not a 3to 1 ratio, its a 3/12 pitch, meaning for every foot you come (the 12) you rise 3 inches and that is no way to determine where the birdsmouth is going to be cut. Read the book its all there.

[u/sircharlieg]

I know that was a hypothetical, but Jesus H Christ if I had squirrels gnawing through my rafters, I'd be a bit intimidated by those squirrels.

Decent tutorial, though.

[u/witwiki50]

In england , we call this a Set Square