Learned a trick from an old carpenter in Nashville about stair gauges

I was working a trim job in Nashville last spring and this older guy named Walt walked by my site. He saw me struggling with my stair stringers and just stopped to watch for a minute. Then he told me I was using my framing square all wrong for measuring riser heights. He showed me how to clamp a scrap of wood to the square as a stop block so I don't have to reset it every single time. That one tip saved me about 20 minutes per set of stairs on that whole project. Has anyone else picked up a weird little trick like that from a random passerby?

2 comments

2 Comments

craig.sage1mo ago

Walt sounds like a good dude, I had an old painter show me how to use a 5-in-1 tool to scrape caulk and I never looked back.

ryanh561mo agoTop Commenter

Is it really that big of a deal though? I mean, it's just scraping caulk, not like you're learning to rebuild an engine or something.