Son and wife asked for a combination firehouse/ dollhouse for grandson and granddaughter. Making it a combination seemed like a disaster in the making, so told them I wouldn't do a combination, but would sure do one for each. Son came over to work with me (never did much of that as a child, too interested in books- but now wishes he had more practical knowledge).
Got to the roof- gonna be a 4/12, and we were trying to figure out what the mitre should be. From somewhere in my troubled past (I helped my dad the carpenter a lot as a kid), about 17 1/2 degrees kept coming up in my head. Son is trying to solve it with trig- but he's 15 years out of high school, and is a newspaper editor, so is a little rusty with the math. I ended up drawing and cutting out a triangle on heavy paper, stood it up next to the radial arm saw blade and adjusted it accordingly (came out just about 17 1/2 degrees, and worked perfectly, by the way).
My question is- without resort to any trig tables or super whiz-bang calculators that we didn't have, could we have come up with the angle using trig?
Got to the roof- gonna be a 4/12, and we were trying to figure out what the mitre should be. From somewhere in my troubled past (I helped my dad the carpenter a lot as a kid), about 17 1/2 degrees kept coming up in my head. Son is trying to solve it with trig- but he's 15 years out of high school, and is a newspaper editor, so is a little rusty with the math. I ended up drawing and cutting out a triangle on heavy paper, stood it up next to the radial arm saw blade and adjusted it accordingly (came out just about 17 1/2 degrees, and worked perfectly, by the way).
My question is- without resort to any trig tables or super whiz-bang calculators that we didn't have, could we have come up with the angle using trig?