Reply To: Night stand table – No longer square after glue-up
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I’m not a math wiz, so I’m curious how you got to your calculations. I’m sure I can find them … somewhere …
Its called the “law of cosines” which gives the included angle C
of a triangle with sides a
, b
, c
as
cos(C) = (a^2+b^2-c^2)/(2*a*b)
where C
is the angle included between sides a
, b
. In our case we have a nearly right triangle with c
as the diagonal. What you measure as 1/16″ is the difference between diagonals of a parallelogram[Note 1] that is nearly a rectangle. For small deviations this difference will appear as half that much (1/32″) in each diagonal, one shorter and the other longer than ideal values.
All that put together, and using the fact that deviations are small, and letting a = b
for simplicity, gives a simple expression for the angular error in radians as[Note 2]
angular error = 0.7 d/a
(or 0.5 c*d/(a*b)
in the more general case of differing a
and b
).
where d
is the measured error (1/16″ in our case). Multiply by 57 (180/pi to be precise) to get the angular error in degrees. For d = 1/16″, a = b = 24″, its about 0.1 degree.
Notes
1. The carcass is a parallelogram provided the pieces were cut accurately to start with.
2. To get that expression use cos(x) = sin (pi/2 - x)
and some approximations:
(i) sine of a small angle is the angle itself in radians
(ii) for small deviations d^2/c^2
is much smaller than d/c
and can be neglected
3. For narrow and long boxes (a << b
or b << a
), the angular error is close to 0.5d/a
where a
is the shorter side. Which could be much larger than d/b
where b
is the longer side. This may come as a surprise to some.