Inse

The memory has failed me. How do you calculate the area of a triangle? I have the length of the sides and it is not a right angled triangle. The angles differ.

ill_only_miss_eastenders

i need a pencil!

http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/proje...i9/bk7_9i5.htm

Novocastrian

0.5*base*perpendicular height

Inse

Many thanks

Souvenir

OK, smarty pants, how do you cut 47 degree cuts on a mitre saw without mutilating yourself?

Novocastrian

You hire a woodworker, duh!

Tuppence

Another long weekend, another brush with disaster?

Souvenir

It was indeed a bloody long weekend, of DIY, DIY and more DIY. It would have been longer but for the fact that Home Depot ran out of the baseboard I was using and Rona doesn't stock it.

I wish I had never suggested using hardwood instead of MDF.

Tuppence

I get the sense that while the rest of us look forward to a summer of long weekends, that you just look forward to winter?

Oakvillian

I'm sure you've accomplished this by now, but in case you need to do it again, cut a slim triangular wedge to use as a jig on the fence of your mitre saw. Assuming your saw has a "fixed" setting for 45°, you need to make a 2° jig - a triangle with a base-to-height ratio of 1:29, or roughly half an inch per foot* will do the job. All you then need to do is work out which way round to put the wedge for inside and outside mitres, then cut away to your heart's content.

I did something similar a while back (damn those unsquare corners) and subtracted when I should have been adding, or vice versa - ended up with a load of expensive offcuts. Memories of "measure twice, cut once" spoken by crusty old woodwork teachers came back to haunt me...

[*in case anyone cares, for small angles sinθ = tanθ, so it doesn't make much difference, within reason, what the angles at the base of the triangle are]

Souvenir

I know that; I was just winding up beardy. It gets quite interesting when you're doing 67 degree cuts on a bit of wood an inch and a half wide. How to clamp, and retain fingers, becomes a major question.

Oakvillian

I thought (hoped) you probably were - seemed otherwise a surprising question from such an accomplished craftsman (I remember seeing pics of your kitchen refit and staircase panelling...)

I'd just been trying to help with a question from a neighbour's kid about statistics stuff which required me to remember far too much about integral calculus - probability density functions and all that malarkey. Trigonometry seemed like a nice easy wind-down after that!

Novocastrian

Beardy? Beardy!!? And... I was making 47 degree mitre cuts when you were in nappies. Although that would be hard to believe if we were in an ID line up together. Pshaw.

Bill_S

Souvenir

I've got one of those, or at least something very similar. I used it a few times before chucking it in a drawer and buying a proper mitre saw.