8/8/2023 0 Comments Starrett protractorEven better, how do you determine the required miter angles for crown molding when it has to run around an oddly shaped room with unusual corner angles? Use a protractor, right? Wrong. Great, right? Well, how do you know if you need to cut a 45°, 46°, or even a 50° miter for a corner that may be a little out-of-square. Today, miter saws are more precise, miter gauges on some saws have 1° increments, we have laser cut readings, and micro-fine adjustment knobs so we can dial in an angle just right. Is your angle 90° or 45°? My saw doesn’t have a setting for 90° so it must be 45°, right? Fast forward to the present day While both could be great carpenters, they wouldn’t understand what or how the other was describing what the other needed. You could never take two guys that hadn’t worked together and put them on a job. Single cut, miter cut, 45°, 90° (are you talking about the actual angle of the corner or the ‘miter’ setting on the saw to cut a piece to fit that angle?)…. It was like each of us spoke a different language. Get two carpenters going about the problem of using a protractor with a miter saw and forget it! You may as well take the day off. Not knowing what miter you needed, a single cut or miter cut could be troublesome. If you weren’t cutting with the saw locked in a detent at 0° or 45° it was a real crapshoot. chop saw (with a broken or missing miter gauge, I might add) and do my darnedest to intersect my pencil marks through that little plastic viewfinder. I’d draw two parallel lines on either side of the scrap and go back to the monster Hitachi 15-in. Then I’d take scrap material and lay it on top of the final material intersecting the first piece. I can remember temporarily nailing fascia or trim in place, purposefully making it extra-long. If we thought an outside miter looked like it was 45°, we’d cut the first piece 22 1/2-we’d gamble to see if the next mate was going to look good at 22 1/2. Nope, back then, we’d cut a few scraps, then eyeball it, check it, go back and cut it again and again until the scraps looked good, and then we’d know the right miter angle and cut the final material. And we certainly didn’t have a small indestructible “idiot proof” gadget that told us the exact miter for a particular corner, so that when we cut our molding, or even our fascia for decks, the joinery would be perfect. No air-nailers, certainly no cordless drills, no portable table saws, no Festool. The 359, with its 360 scale and fine-adjust, is clearly "the one to have" if you are gonna use it for layout.Ī new question has arrisen with regard to these protractors: Why are the ends of the straightedge cut off at different angles ? One end is a 30 degree angle, and the other end is a 45.When I started building, 20-something years ago, we were lucky to have had a ‘chop saw’ on the job site. One is one the scale, the other is on the blank area, unless you are right at 0 or 180) (Only one vernier is useable at any time because of the 180 degree main scale. (They are adjustable with tiny screws) A strength of the 364 is that in some applications, you might have to stand on your head to read a 359 whereas a 364 will have the active vernier upright. The 359 has a 360 degree main scale, thus requiring only one vernier scale.Īn obvious drawback of the 364 is that both scales have to be correctly calibrated. This is necessary because the 364 has a 180 degree main scale. It's interesting to note that the 364 actually has TWO vernier scales, 180 degrees apart. Thank you for that helpful summary of your catalog research.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |