How Do I Know if A Square is Square?

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you do any kind of carpentry work or work in the shop, building cabinets, doing carcass work, most likely you've got one of these, a framing square. But how do you know if it's square? And if it's not, how do you adjust it? Stay tuned and I'll show you how. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. I have several framing squares. I've had them over the years. This is an old dude I've had for a long time. It's served me well. And this is a recent addition. I like the aluminum framing squares because when they're out in the sun, they don't absorb as much heat and hold it. And so it's a little bit more comfortable to work with. And besides, when you've been working hard all day, every place you can cut a little bit of weight with the tools that you're using, that serves me well. So I use aluminum squares. Now, if a square is out and it gets run over by something, it gets bent and it no longer lays flat, all bets are off as far as I'm concerned as far as using it accurately. Might be a good relic, but you really can't depend on it to be ultra, ultra true. So assuming that you haven't run over your square and that it's nice and flat, then how do you know that it indeed is 90 degrees here and that when you use it, you're actually getting 90 degrees off of the edge? Well, there's a real simple test to figure that out. And it looks like this. I'm gonna go ahead and put the tongue of the square along here and have the blade go out. So I'll just make sure that I'm up against this, that I've got it good and tight against this edge. And then I'll go ahead and draw a line up this way. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and roll the tongue over like this and then bring this back to here. And the reason I'm doing the rollover is if there is an error, if this is too tight, it's closed in, or it's too open, it's open. Whatever that error is, it's going to be doubled. So I've already done this drawing right there. It is what it is. Now I'm gonna roll this over and I'm gonna bring back this to here. And I have a choice. Either I can visually look at it. And as you can see, that's pretty doggone good. I can either draw right over the top of it again like this, or I can actually separate a line between them like this and draw it and take a look right down that and say, are those parallel? Well, those lines are. So this is our old guy, all right? So I've got that as our old one. Now, I've just recently bought this brand new little Milwaukee. Love this square, it's beautiful. Color's nice, it's easy to spot in the shop. Everything's etched on here, laser etched. But let's just test it and see if it came right out of the factory perfectly square. So we're gonna go ahead and pop it onto the edge of the table, push against it here to make sure it's firmly there. And we'll go ahead and draw that line just like we did with the other unit. And now we're gonna roll the tongue over. I'll move this one down to get us out of the way. And let's see what we get. Look at that, we have some divergence here. So if I draw a line, let's say right here, look at that. What that is saying is that this is pinched in just slightly and you're seeing the doubling error. Starts right there at the same thing. We're bumping the lines. And by the time we get out 24 inches out, we've got well over an eighth, maybe three sixteenths there of divergence. Well, how do you fix it? Do you take this and throw it away? Do you take it back and get another one? Well, you can, or you can adjust it right here in the shop using this technique. Well, we've determined that this is actually closed in a little bit too much. So we need to open it slightly. To do that, what we're gonna do is draw an imaginary line from the inside corner of the tongue and the blade or the other way around. This imaginary line that's right here. If I need to get this to open, what I'm gonna do is dimple right in here. Smack this in, this punch, this dimple into there. And in so doing, the blade and the tongue will open up. If it was the other way around, it was pinched closed, and I need to open it the other way, then I'm gonna move to the back half here at this heel right here. And along that imaginary line again, I'm gonna dimple right there to get this to close. So as I said, we saw, and when you put this up here, that we actually have a problem with it being too tight of an angle, we need to open it up. So we're gonna use an imaginary line back through here. We'll go ahead and take this right here, and we're gonna smack this several times. You see I've got a good size dimple in there. I'll go ahead and put another one, at least a half amount. And let's try it again, let's see what happens. So we're gonna throw this on the line. We're just gonna start over again instead of trying to use the other line. We'll go ahead and draw a line like this. We'll roll it over and come back to it, and look at that, look how close we are. As a matter of fact, we probably overdid it just slightly. Do you see right there? So what I can do is actually go to the back side right here and put another dimple. Let's just see what we get. Look at that, you guys. Look at there. So now I know I have a square square. Shop adjusted, calibrated, and from time to time, you can check this using this technique, and then go ahead and adjust your square by dimpling like this. Pretty slick, huh? Well, there's all these kind of tricks that you learn out in the field, you see other people do, and I'd like to remember who taught me this, but I can't, it's just the kind of cool people you get to hang around with that are hands-on people. If you've got a tip or technique like this that you find to be helpful, you wanna make sure that we get to pass on to your fellow viewers, won't you send it in the comment section below? If you've got an idea for another kind of video like this that you'd like for us to do, send that in as well. If you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel, and when you do, make sure you ring the bell because you'll get notified immediately whenever a new episode comes out in the shop here, out in truck life, around the kitchen, in the garden, and other great product reviews you'll use around the home and shop. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay with DirtFarmerJay.com with a new square square.