if i wanted to find the angle like in the picture...what tool would i need?

 

Um, a protractor? Or you could get the rise and the run and have fun with trig.

 

maybe laying a degree wheel there would work?



i know i seen something for this before. when someone was making a roll cage and had to match the bend from one side to another. kinda like a protractor, but not...

 

Ummm... I don't see a picture?

 

I'd take it to work and use a comparitor. Mmmm comparitor.

 

A simple protractor for drawing takeoffs. However, you should not scale from drawings. The data on the drawing must always make sense, The drawing itself may not make sense at all. For example, the drawing is made from an engineers sketch.



Have you ever talked to an engineer? So every day, somewhere a new drawing is turned out that is absolute gibberish. Once a production piece is proven, the drawing used for production is altered to hide some or all of the data. Many corps use a faint orange band across production drawings, so if an attempt is made to photo copy it the orange background becomes a black band obscuring the data. In the Government, if we had not paid for the data rights, we got drawings that were without dimensions, and out of scale. Data theft between corps and countries is a very big problem.



The pieces produced will not fit together. In many cases where the data is Patent rich, and, or the data is limited (and it is so stated on the drawing) (like a copyrighted song or poem) the data may be corrupted in some way that is not obvious. This may be the practice of a particular company. A measurement may be in both Metric and English, but everyone in that production organization knows to disregard the English dimensions. One feature on each piece may have both systems with faulty values, but those values can be resolved from other data on the drawing.



An angle may be called out to the arc second, so as to appear to be very important. When the lines are

laid out to cut the piece based on the angle, the dimension from a vertical line may not even be close.



It is untypical to develop angle data from a some sort of protractor when it is available from known dimensions. So, if you have paid for the data then we may suspect that the data is accurate and you have the "rights" to build one piece from the drawing, then the data should be accurate. You use the setbacks and hights to develop the angles. Not a device applied to the drawing. In the example drawing, the protractor must be laid on the angle line extended through the square tube. Alternatively, the base line or bottom of the drawing may be extended above the square tube, so as to get the correct angle with no confusion about the square tube along the bottom. So now you break out the seldom used parallel set, and move that line up above the square tube. Now you can recover that angle anywhere along that line. There you go, more than you wanted to know about drawings.



If those square tubes will be closed in the finished piece I can draw you a trick that will do that and make

all of the closed tubes look well finished.



Lynn E. Hanover

 

My brain hurts now.

 

so an everyday protractor it is? nothing more professional?



these are drawings from a completed frame. so all dimensions have been found to be correct from the many builders who used them before myself, and then reccomended them down to me.



and it is labeled that ths drawing is not to scale. but the numbers indictaed for lengths and angles are correct. this is just one page onf many to build the frame.

 

Thats what I used to make up a jig to cut out the bend pieces for my header. For other projects I've used a simple rafter angle square and/or T-bevel tool to mark cuts. It's easier if you just have a saw that can accurately cut the angles. Compound miter cuts are a little trickier.