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TIL I was using my speed square wrong for 5 years | Everyday Tool Hacks - Librear

TIL I was using my speed square wrong for 5 years

Honestly I figured out last week while framing a shed that I had been reading my speed square completely backwards for marking angles. I always lined up the pivot point with the edge and used the common rafter numbers but somehow had the square flipped and was getting cuts that were off by like 15 degrees. My buddy Mike walked over and looked at my marks and just laughed. He grabbed the square, flipped it around so the fence was against the board, and showed me how the numbers actually correspond to the angle you want. I felt like an idiot but now cuts take half the time and actually fit right. Has anyone else had a tool moment where you realized you were making things harder for no reason?

2 comments

2 Comments

abbyl495mo ago

The thing is though I've been using a speed square for a decade and I always mark angles with the fence against the board and the pivot point on the edge. Like that is literally the correct way to use it according to every framing guide I've seen. I think your buddy Mike might have shown you a shortcut that works for rough cuts but the actual numbers on the square are designed to read from the pivot point when the fence is flush against the board. On my Swanson big 12 square the common rafter numbers line up exactly with the angle markings if you hold it that way. Maybe you were just reading the wrong set of numbers the whole time.

jordan1845mo ago

Wait so are you saying the pivot point is supposed to be lined up different depending on if you're marking a rafter cut versus a regular angle cut? Because I always just set the fence flat against the board and pivot the square to whatever degree I need, and that's what I thought everybody did. But now I'm second guessing myself because I've seen guys on job sites flip the square around backwards sometimes and I never knew what they were doing. Like does the square actually have two different ways to hold it for different types of cuts or is that just some old timer myth?