Back when I was working as a carpenter I worked for a guy renovating timber framed buildings, he had his own saw mill, when we needed wood we would go up the yard, choose a suitable tree trunk, bring it down the yard using a Rapier diesel electric crane and put it on the travelling table of the 46 inch Stenner band mill to cut it to size or if it was too big cut it down to size using a Stihl chainsaw mill with an aluminium ladder as a guide.


When buying the timber as round sections we measured it in Hoppus feet, I have several Hoppus ready reckoners on my bookshelf. The gaffer had a Hoppus tape measure, but they are like hens teeth unlike the ready reckoners.


You can easily measure without a tape, simply loop a length of cord around the round section of timber, hold it to with your fingers then fold the length that is the circumference into four then measure that and treat it as one side of a square, it’s close to the true measurement and averages out the segments fairly accurately, but not quite though that doesn’t actually matter if everyone knows what the means and units of measurement are.


That was actually one of the best and most enjoyable jobs I ever had, but good things don’t last forever.


There’s a Saturday night challenge, work out the area of a circle by using a quarter of the circumference squared rather than by A = π r² and compare the results.

Back when I was working as a carpenter I worked for a guy renovating timber framed buildings, he had his own saw mill, when we needed wood we would go up the yard, choose a suitable tree trunk, bring it down the yard using a Rapier diesel electric crane and put it on the travelling table of the 46 inch Stenner band mill to cut it to size or if it was too big cut it down to size using a Stihl chainsaw mill with an aluminium ladder as a guide.


When buying the timber as round sections we measured it in Hoppus feet, I have several Hoppus ready reckoners on my bookshelf. The gaffer had a Hoppus tape measure, but they are like hens teeth unlike the ready reckoners.


You can easily measure without a tape, simply loop a length of cord around the round section of timber, hold it to with your fingers then fold the length that is the circumference into four then measure that and treat it as one side of a square, it’s close to the true measurement and averages out the segments fairly accurately, but not quite though that doesn’t actually matter if everyone knows what the means and units of measurement are.


That was actually one of the best and most enjoyable jobs I ever had, but good things don’t last forever.


There’s a Saturday night challenge, work out the area of a circle by using a quarter of the circumference squared rather than by A = π r² and compare the results.