Tables on Framing Square

[Jim Murphy]

I finally replaced my trusty, rusty framing square with one of those yellow on black aluminum Stanley contractor specials... enjoyed decoding the tables printed on it, since it did not come with any explanation. Got all but one figgered out. I'm stumped, however, by the evenly spaced numbers (multiples of 10, separated by 9 little evenly spaced circles, running from 10 to 60 and not aligned with anything else) running along the tongue. Anybody got any idea what they have to do with squares or framing?

[Australopithecus scobis]

Octagons. You need dividers. Numbers are the size of the piece, in inches. Set dividers, you get the length of each face.

Does anybody actually use this scale?

[Phil Crow]

I just bought a book off *b*y called "The Steel Square and Its Uses" or somesuch. It's 400 pages. Gimme a month, I'll tell you anything you wanna know :)

Apparently, the framing square can be used to decode the meaning of the universe; that's a fact I learned while reading another book. Thus far, my experience has been almost exclusively with the speed square, so I'm looking forward to learning some things about the framing square.

-Phil Crow