okay let's face it the success or failure of your project can often come down to how well you measure stuff up trust me i've come unstuck on many an occasion because of that very reason because as the old saying goes sometimes it's the archer and not the arrow that's the problem if you know what i mean [Music] g'day folks uncle knackers here now to make life easier for us head scratching measuring challenged diys in today's video i'm going to share with you five life-changing measuring hacks guaranteed to make life easier and also to help improve your productivity let's go now with woodworking there are times who am i kidding there are many times where you need to find the center of a board or in fact break that border into equal parts now this method is one of the coolest ones going around it doesn't require any complicated mathematics so it's right up my alley and all you need is either a builder square tape measure or a ruler now don't get me wrong you can still use the old method of measuring the width with your ruler or tape measure and then dividing by two but you can make a mistake especially if this is an odd number or a tricky fraction try this out and see how you go with the outside tip or point of your ruler or tape measure carefully line that outside tip or point up to the edge of the board now check this out with that point sorted all you need to do is to pivot from there until a large hole number comes in contact with the edge of our board now in my case that's 400 millimeters so if i come back 200 which is the halfway point and put a mark that point right there is going to be exactly in the center of that board now 400 is also 16 inches so if we came back 8 inches put that same mark in place that again would be the center of that board now the beauty of this is that we're only dealing in large whole numbers so it's actually quite simple to divide by two we're not trying to divide an odd number or a complicated fraction so for me that's a big win now just say for instance you want to break this board up into four different segments all you need to do is with that 400 on the edge right there put marks at 100 200 and 300 and you'll finish up with four equal segments gotta love that [Music] now personally i don't own a purpose-built marking gauge but i do have a homemade one that does the job just as well now this great little tip came from colin kineta over at the woodwork web and all i did was in the center of my combination square blade i drilled a small hole smack on that 10 millimeter mark if this was a imperial combination square i'd drill that hole at the one inch mark now just say for example that i wanted to mark a 70 millimeter line all the way along here all you need to do is to set your combination square to 80 millimeters remember we've already come in 10 and then lock that off with the locking nut which is that thing there and then just simply place a sharp pencil into that hole and away you go now if we go ahead and do a little check you'll see that that is now a perfect 70 millimeters now here's a great tip just in case you don't have a pencil nice and handy now virtually all combination squares come with this very handy feature which surprisingly not many people know about if you're one of them let me know down below and that is it's this little knob here that either screws out or pulls out depending on the model that you have and what it is is this very handy little marking scribe with a very sharp hardened tip also good for marking metal and masonry and we can use this instead of that pencil speaking about measuring things i do apologize in advance for today's dad joke friends kept telling me that i wasn't good enough to make jokes about tape measures fair dinkum true story they told me i'd never measure up cheeky sods give them tape measures in a minute now here's a really cool trick if you're trying to mark a square line and you don't have yourself either a large framing square or a t-square now my old mate pythagoras was the genius behind this mathematical wizardry and i'm pretty sure the egyptians were all over it when are building their pyramids it's called the 345 method and this is how you do it now before i go ahead and show you how to do that this is a quick example of how the three four five method works and it doesn't matter whether you're using inches centimeters feet or meters it's all going to work out the same now this row here is example one and this row here is example two now the idea is to increase each of those numbers by the same increment so for this row here example one i'm using the increment of 100 millimeters so 3 times 100 is 300 4 times 100 is 400 and 5 times 100 is 500 and for example 2 down here i'm using the increment of 200 millimeters so 3 times 200 is 600 4 times 200 800 and 5 times 200 is a thousand or a meter and using that framework let's go ahead and mark a square line so basically all we're trying to do is to mark a square 90 degree line off that edge now for this example i'm using increments of 100 millimeters because it suits the size of the sheet but like i said before that could be three meters four meters five meters or three feet four feet five feet it just depends on the job that you're working on but for this their first measurement is 300 millimeters so lock your tape over the end and mark 300 right on the edge now for the 400 millimeter measurement just grab your tape measure and on its side place the inside edge on our mark and then run the tape out just past 400 millimeters now on the inside of your tape not the outside but the inside run your thumb down until it just kisses that 400 millimeter mark and then rest your pencil against that and draw a small arc and for the 500 millimeter measurement just again place the inside edge of our tape on that corner run that out to 500 millimeters lock your thumb at that point and then draw an arc and it should intersect the previous one that we just did now because we use the three four five method where these two lines intersect here and they're marked down there if we draw a line straight up through them would finish up with a beautifully square line to that edge and if we do a little test you'll see that that is absolutely perfect and now we can use that line and that edge as reference points for future measurements thanks pythagoras [Music] now once again using our combination square with that hole drilled in the end at the 10 millimeter mark this is a great tip for marking out a circle simply set your combination square to the size of the circle that you want lock that off and take into consideration that we're starting at the 10 millimeter mark take out our marking scribe from the end place it through the hole and lightly tap that into the wood [Applause] then place your pencil tight and hard up against the blade in the handle and away you go now one hand is all you need and check this out beautiful now this next one isn't exactly a measuring
