Measurement Tips for Building a Table

Views: 9747 | Last Update: 2008-06-16
Tips on taking measurements for building a table in this free carpentry and woodworking video. View Video Transcript

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Michael Etzrodd

Video Transcript

Now, with our apron pieces I'm not going to go all the way end to end with these apron pieces. What I want is I want my leg piece to fit just inside the line. So my apron piece is just going to fit just inside, just inside. So normally what I would do a simple way to do it is just take your pencil make a mark on both sides. Now this process is easier than trying to do the math. If you have a problem with math everything is by sight. If you want to do the math, all we do is subtract 4 inches which is 2 inches, 2 inches for the other leg, subtract that from our 16 and 1/8 and that'll give us our inside dimension. But if you aren't a math person, this is a great easy way to do it. Myself I'm not a big math guy so I do everything by sight, if I see it I know what it is and it works out perfectly for me. Also one of the things that when you're tackling a project and you don't have a lot of knowledge, you'll always be daunting because there's a lot of little steps and with the math technical stuff that you may not know about, I find it easier to break everything down into baby steps. So I took that little step, now I need to know what this is, I'm going to measure that, breaking it down. That way if I can't do math I can see it right here and I've got my lines, just a matter of putting the tape measure on it and I'm 12 and 1/8 inches for here, 20 inches there. So math works out, okay and I don't have to measure everything because for it to be square this dimension is the same as this one, this dimension is the same as this one. So we know now that we're going to cut our 1x3 material down to these 2 dimensions, 2 and 2; 1, 2, 1, 2. So we've got that knowledge.