Spent 15 years cutting stair stringers with the framing square upside down

I was cutting stringers for a set of deck stairs in Boise last month and nothing was lining up right, kept getting a 1/4 inch gap at the bottom step. A retired guy named Hank who was helping me looked at my square and asked why the numbers were reading backwards. Turns out I had been flipping the square the wrong way since I started in 2009, which meant my rise and run marks drifted on every stringer I ever cut. I pulled out a scrap and tried it his way, and the marks lined up perfect on the first try. All those years of blaming warped boards and bad layouts, and it was me holding the tool wrong the entire time. Any of you get taught a bad habit early on that took forever to catch?

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andrew69318d ago

Read the instructions wrong for a decade is just being human.

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