Speed Square Mastery: Stop Using It Wrong

Here are all the uses of a speed square. Let's get after it. The speed square was created by a guy named Albert Swanson and yes, Swanson speed squares are still around today and actually one of the more cheaper speed squares. You get the speed square, a belt clip and and this handy book. So we're going to go through this book and see what Swanson intended the speed square to be. Now Swanson created the speed square because he was sick of having to use a framing square. They're big, they're clunky and they require a lot of math. A speed square has a few different uses, a lot of different uses and we're going to go through them right now. So the first use of a speed square and the most common use is your 90°. So go ahead and put your fence up against there, trace [snorts] that, and that's your 90. The second use of it is a 45. Simple. This is a 45 and this is a 90. All right, so the second use of a speed square is scribing a line. So all these indents here at quarter inch and every speed square is different. Your Empire one doesn't really have a scribing feature. Your Swanson one does, um, but the Milwaukee is probably the most profound scribing feature. So this board right here is 7 in and say we want to split it in half. Put our pencil at the 3 and 1/2 mark and go ahead and draw >> [snorts] >> draw our line like that. The third use of the speed square is for like layout and design type stuff. It finds perfect 90s either this way or it finds perfect [snorts] 90s this way and you could screw it together and you'd have a perfect 90. So another use of a speed square is a saw guide. So you can take your circular saw like this, put it right up against your speed square and cut. Now a lot of people like to push their square. I prefer to pull it towards me. So go ahead and put your square there, gives you a nice straight cut. Perfectly straight cut. All right, so another use of a speed square is a protractor. You'll see a bunch of degrees right here and right in the corner it says right in the corner it says pivot. Now it says it on all of them. Your Milwaukee, your Empire and even your Swanson one. So go ahead and put your pivot on the edge of your board like this and now find the degrees that you want. So we can do 15° and you don't want to trace this side. You always want to trace the side that your pivot's on. So 15°. Or 30 or 40 and even 45. That 45 is going to be almost a perfect 45, right? Now speed squares can do rafter layouts and finding the pitch of your roof all by using our hip and valley and common. You can cut bird's mouths, soffit and fascia all using a speed square. So one trick to find the pitch of your roof is to go ahead and put your speed square on there like that and put your pivot at the top and pivot up to where your speed square is level. So if we grab a level here and we bring it all the way up to where it's level. Like that. We know that this roof pitch is a 4 12 pitch, right? And now we're with that information, we're going to cut out our bird's mouth and I'll show you how to do that. All right, so say we want to cut a rafter for the other side of our mock up here. Right here on this scale you have your hip and your valley. And then you have your common. So your hip and your valley is when you have like two peaks that come like this and then you got a two peak over there. You would have a valley and a hip, right? Your common is for your rafters. So go ahead and put your square on the edge of your rafter and rotate your common until you find what pitch you want. In our case, like this, it's 4 12. So take your 4 12 just like that. Bring it a little bit more and trace the backside just like if you were to do degrees. Now on some speed squares, you do have a conversion table where it'll tell you your common to your degrees. So a four is an 18 and 1/2 degree cut. So we can use our four on our common or we can go to 18 and 1/2 degrees, whatever you prefer. So now you're going to have these diamonds. Now the Milwaukee one has it the best. Well, Swanson has it the best, but Milwaukee has multiple. So you see this one diamond right here at inch and a half. That's for stud layout. So if you were to put this here, you can mark here, you can mark here, you can mark here and so on and so forth. If you're building a door, you have your king, jack, whatever studs, you can build a door pretty easily. The 3 and 1/2 is for your seat cut and it gives you the perfect seat cut, right? And then your top plate is 3 and 1/2 in. The Milwaukee also has one for at 5 and 1/2 in for 2 by 6 top plate. Your Empire does as well, this cutout right here. And then it has a the Swanson has a diamond. So go ahead and put your pivot point on the edge and make sure that your line that you just cut or you just drew is going right through right through your diamond and trace it. And now that would be what you'd cut out to give you your bird's mouth. Now if we were to cut this one out like we did this one, that one would sit right on there as well. So now that we got our bird's mouth drawn out, now we can do our fascia. So same thing. Go ahead, mark your four on your common, draw a line. That's going to be 90° and then to do your your soffit, all you're going to do is you're going to measure down, put that at 90 and cut that out. So this would be for your fascia, this would be for your soffit, this right here is for your bird's mouth. So now you see how to find a plumb line up with a speed square. So you're going to go ahead and you're going to put this on whatever angle you have, throw a level up on top of it and just bring this until it's level. And now this line right here will be your plumb line. Some squares like this cheap Harbor Freight one have a level built right in, makes it super easy to get a plumb line. All right, so let's say we don't have a level now and we want to draw a straight line on here. So we can go ahead, we can take a plumb bob, wrap our plumb bob around the side of it. So put our plumb bob right at the peak and go until you line the string up with the 45 on the thing. Now this right here, this bottom is going to be a straight line without having a level. Now another use of a speed square which we touched on in the beginning, but this is more tool related. Now this this would be for your your miter saws or your circular saws or even your table saws. If you want to make sure that your blade's straight before you make your cut, go ahead and pull back your guard, put that up tight there and as you can see, >> [snorts] >> my blade is straight. Now one more quick tip here. You always want to check and make sure that your square is actually square, right? All right, so one way you can do that is go ahead and >> [snorts] >> mark this side here and then essentially just flip it over, line it up right there and mark your line. So just like that you can see how these lines overlap each other, so my square is good and I do that every once in a while. On a bunch of different squares, right? This one, that one, whatever. So one last thing that the Milwaukee square offers that not a lot of other squares do and that's this right here. Fits 1 in outside diameter pipe. That's the biggest you can put in here. You can use it for really anything. You can use it as a stand here, take your band saw and cut and this is going to hold your your pipe pretty steady. Now that about wraps up our uses of a speed square. I know there's probably a couple more that I didn't cover in this video. If you want to see more uses, go ahead and check out my Instagram down below. I went over all of these uses over the last week or so, more in detail, more in depth. And of course, if you guys want to see something, drop it in the comments below. I'll always be happy to cover it. Now when it comes to picking out a speed square, I'll cover this real quick. When it comes to picking out a speed square, there are many, many, many, many, many different options and many different brands from your Milwaukee to your original Swanson, Empire, your cheap old Milwaukee one and also anything from a 12 in rafter all the way down to a 4 and 1/2. So say you're going out and you want to buy your first speed square, what are you going to look for? Find the speed square that's going to work best for you. This Milwaukee one was my first speed square ever and yes, it served me well. I've I've done a lot with it and it and it's been fantastic to me and it's got some options on here that the Swanson does not have or the Empire doesn't have, but the Empire also has the common to degree chart on it as where the Milwaukee cut that out for the pipe. If you if you know that you're only going to do trim work, maybe this little 4 and 1/2 is perfect for you. Something you can keep in your pocket, deploy when needed. You only need 4 and 1/2 inches. That might be great for you. Uh if you want to go original and probably honestly the cheapest one, I picked this one up the other day for $14 at Ace Hardware here in town. It didn't just come with the speed square, but it came with a little book on how to use the speed square as well as this convenient belt clip. So, there are many different options out there. This one from Harbor Freight has been fantastic as well. I like these plastic ones for one thing and I haven't done it here in my shop, but we have a plastic one at work and we went ahead and we cut the corner off for when we weld, we can get it right up in there and uh our weld bead goes right through here and it [snorts] and it works perfectly for us at work. Um yeah, just go ahead and shop around, figure out what you really want and what you need. If you're going to do a lot of scribing and you're going to do maybe some all around handyman stuff where you want to cut the pipe and you want to your stud layout and your your 3 and 1/2 and your 5 and 1/2 top plates, um maybe go with the Milwaukee or Empire maybe a little bit cheaper than Milwaukee. You get your conversion. You guys get what I'm saying here. Shop around, figure out what you want and what's going to work the best for you. And if you have any comments or if you have any problems, drop it in the comment below. I'll answer it the best I can. Now with all that being said, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drop a couple options for speed squares down below. I'm also looking for ideas for the channel, right? Like I'm going to redo the garage this summer and and I got some a smoker build I want to do and and just some other stuff that I want to do this summer. So, if you guys want to see anything, go ahead and again, drop a comment down below. Whatever you guys want to see, whether it's tool related, building related, I don't care. I like doing it all. So, let me know. Anyways, it's Sunday night. I got stuff to do. I'll see you guys later. Peace.