This is Confusing
Please help. This is so confusing.
The order in which I typically proceed when I’m stumped or just totally ignorant about something is as follows: Faith, YouTube, Reddit. Aside from all the times Faith either knows or helps me figure it out, the best case scenario is someone on YouTube or Reddit knows and explains how to do it. The next best and somewhat comforting scenario is that someone on YouTube or Reddit encountered the same problem and was equally confused. The worst-case scenario is that I spend too much time watching videos or reading comments where people seem to know how to do it, but skip the single most important step I’m trying to figure out.
NB. By Faith, I mean my partner in life and in the shop. Not like, faith in whatever.
This happened recently. My best friend Scott asked me to build a small tray for his girlfriend Jill. Simple. A shallow box with no lid. I said I’d make one with angled sides, maybe some splines, a dark wood like walnut, and I would bookmatch the bottom of the tray (when you saw a board down the middle, open the two sides up, lay them side by side, and the grain patterns mirror each other). I got this, brother.
Turns out that angled sides are a special kind of conundrum if you want to miter them. What I found on YouTube was a cast of people showing how to make a classic angle-sided tray with butt joints. The only trick there is to pick an angle, usually between 15 and 18 degrees, and cut the edges of the sides and the bottom of the tray at that angle. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to miter the corners of the sides of the tray.
The complexity level of doing this felt familiar from my days of installing crown molding as a finish carpenter. However, like an internet algorithm that somehow knows you better than you know yourself, modern miter saws anticipate this, so they incorporate unique measurement marks and mechanical stops into the machine to assist you. For some silly reason, sawmakers didn’t predict my desire to make an angle-sided tray. They’re no help.
The issue with crown molding is similar, though, which is that unlike a standard box, you’re dealing with two angles on each corner, a “compound angle,” or what’s usually called a compound miter angle or beveled miter. You have the angle of the miter, typically 45 degrees, which creates a 90-degree corner. But then you have the angle of what’s technically the bevel, usually 15 to 18 degrees. That’s what gives the edges their slanted look. If you plan on marrying these angles, I recommend premarital counseling.
I thought I found it on YouTube. She had a multi-part video on this one basic task, an angled tray. She had expensive power tools, clearly a pro, and her style wasn’t flashy or clickbaity. Perfect. I took notes, went to the shop, followed the steps, and decidedly did not end up with a tray with square, 90-degree angles. I was building a parallelogram of some sort, but it was definitely not on its way to becoming a rectangle. After my usual ritual - hands on my head, desperate groaning at the sky routine - it was back to YouTube, digging deeper into the less professionally produced depths of its bowels. I found a gentleman who set out to show how it’s done, and then - “Thank You, I feel slightly better now” - he did the same thing as me. Like a doppleganger in some parallel universe, he repeated the mistake I made with uncanny precision, and he confessed, like me, that he was confused.
A post this long needs a twist, and oh boy, does it have one.
This fine gentleman YouTuber did some research. To perform this bedeviling beveled angle, you either have to retake the SAT and master things like tangent, sine, and cosine, or you have to find someone who went through the trouble of doing that for you and making, oh god, yes, THANK YOU, a compound angle calculator!
Someone in Sweden, it seems - not sure, it’s unclear, but there are Sweden references - has the most confusingly odd homemade website you’ve ever seen. A beehive background with a few bees in the margins, but no mention of beekeeping. What there is, however, is a list of six projects, two recipes, a link to “family photos” that are all just shots of him and maybe his wife building a wall or something, and a very, VERY large weather widget. Here, for your consideration of the randomness of it all, is the list of six “projects”:
Resistor Value and Ratio Calculator
Pressure Washer Dilution Calculator
Homebrewing Projects
Remote Control Chicken Door
Days Between Dates
Compound Angle Calculator
Dwell on that, but also note that when an 18-degree bevel goes looking for a miter to partner up with, that miter degree, per this Swedish scientist homesteader’s calculator, is 42.3, not 45. And he’s right! So freaking right. God bless you, sir. Please enjoy your mead and your bougie chickens while I use your Days Between Dates calculator to figure out how long it would have taken me to use sine and cosine to figure this out without you.
