caught in a box

and working on some angles

Are you an ‘out of the box thinker'?

Do you cross lines without even recognizing they where there?

It’s hip to be square and great to be ‘on the level’.

Especially if you’re a carpenter.

When building with dimensional lumber, it’s easy to make things fit. Everything is cut straight. Put two pieces together and use a square to line them up and a level to get everything done.

Easy.

Until you need to cut angles.

I hate cutting any angles that are not simple geometry. I always screw things up.

Trimming out a privacy screen under some stairs created a huge problem. The angles were wrong and I didn’t want to ruin four or five pieces of wood before getting something almost right.

I looked at my speed square. It had all kinds of markings on it that I never used before.

Sure I could watch a video about ‘how to cut angles’. Something about this tasks made me want to do it myself.

With some guesswork and fumbling I figured out how to get a 37 degree angle from a speed square.

I tried four times on scraps …