WIXLIB

ByCharles CumminsCopyright 1998Revised 2017

Table of ContentsForwardHistory Of The CourseAbout The AuthorHow And Why I Learned The Secret Of Squaring UpHow To Figure Your Diagonal On Five Projects which In Turn Will Teach You ToDo Any Project In The FutureEstablishing Your Corners At The Actual Jobsite Perfectly Every TimeConclusion2

ForwardThank you very much for your order. What you are about to learn, in my opinion, simply can notbe beat when it comes to squaring anything for both speed and accuracy. If you ever find orknow of a better, faster, or more perfect way do it please do let me know and I will gladly sendyou a refund and change to your method.3

History Of The CourseThe Secret of Squaring Up and the home study Master Mason Course were created andcopyrighted in 1998. The Secret of Squaring Up was established in order to show others how tosave time and how to perfectly square up any square or rectangular project. The Master MasonCourse was created to provide hands on training and teach employable skills in the masonrytrade so that the course taker could learn to be brick or block layer in the comfort of their ownhome.The Master Mason Course is the realization of Charles L. Cummins dream of sharing his 36 yearsof experience as a bricklayer, contractor, and a school founder to others.4

About The AuthorCharles was born in Sherman, Texas and has dedicated his working career to the masonry trade.Few people could ever love the masonry trade as much as Charles does. He likes to share hisknowledge and pass on his learned skills to anyone else who wants to learn it too.5

How And Why I Learned The Secret Of Squaring UpLet me tell you the story of how I learned to square up projects the way that I do,hopefully you’ll find it both educational and amusing. I have a High School diploma, though Iwas a sophomore twice and then a senior. The teachers liked me but they knew I wasn’t collegebound. Fortunately still let me graduate. I was one of those guys who should have started layingbrick when I was 15 instead of 18. I started laying brick in 1963. Ninety-five percent of my entirebricklaying and contracting career has been on commercial projects, schools, warehouses,shopping centers, power plants, airports, and military bases. Of the ninety-five percent of jobsthat I have done over the years, it has been others, meaning engineers, surveyors and so forth,who had actually established where the corners were to lay. It was that other five percent thatforced me to find a better way.In 1973, I was working in Fairbanks, Alaska for a masonry contractor who had to findhis own corners and square them up. It would take 3 or 4 of us between 3 or 4 hours to get itdone using the Pythagorean “three, four, five” rule, or perhaps the “fifteen, twenty, twenty five”rule to find the proper square corners of the buildings we were working on. After finding whatwe thought were the corners, we would often end up being anywhere from 6 inches to 2 feet ormore off when we went to measure diagonally. I don’t believe anyone could have tried to bemore accurate than we did. What we usually ended up doing was splitting the difference andmoving this line or that line. There was a particular project where the building measured about240 feet, 0 inches by 60 feet, zero inches with all kinds of porch and entry way jogs in it. Well ittook us close to three hours to finally get our corners square and when we did, we realized thecrew who put the footer in was way off. In fact, the block was totally off the footer!The general contractor and owner (who had also done the footer) said, ”Oh, screw it,put the block on the footer and I’ll have my carpenters fix it.” Sound familiar? To this day I stillsometimes wonder just how much that fancy condominium in Fairbanks, Alaska is really out ofsquare. I’ll never know because I don’t intend to go back there and figure it out. Anyway, I am6

sure the carpenters blamed us and the buck passing started, but that’s not the point. The pointis, look at how much all trades had to suffer in lost time because the building was not square.They did not know what I am about to teach you - The Secret Of Squaring Up.Now, I am going to clear the air in case there’s anyone out there that thinks it’s just thebricklayers’ and construction workers who are the dummies. After Fairbanks, I went to Mexicofor 5 months of vacation. I met a lot of great people from all walks of life who were also therefor the winter. One was an Electrical Engineer for Lawrence Radiation out of Berkeley, California.Translated, that means this guy was actually involved in the detonating of atomic bombsoutside of Las Vegas, Nevada! Anyway, I told him about the Fairbanks condominium. Helaughed and said, ”All you have to do is find your Hypotenuse.” I said, ”What?” (Basic math wasall I had passed in High School). The Bomb Man, as we called him, said, “Well, constructionpeople probably call it the diagonal of a square or rectangular shaped object.” I had heard ofdiagonals before. I asked him, “Well, how do you figure it out?” He said it was easy, “You simplysquare the sides, add the numbers, and find the square root.” Although it had been 10 or 11years since high school, I did remembered hearing about square roots, not that it really matterssince I had probably flunked square roots anyway. I told him, “I can multiply the sides and addthem up, but can you show me how to find the square root of that big number?” He said sure.Well, he couldn’t remember, and his wife still talks about all the hours we spent trying to figureit out while in Mexico. He never was able to explain it to me as he had forgotten it himself!When I got back to the U.S., I ran into my brother-in-law. It just so happens that mybrother-in-law, along with several others, was credited for having invented fiber optics. I toldhim my problem and he said, “No problem! I’ll show you how.” To make a long story short, hecouldn’t remember how to do it either! Luckily he still had his old high school math book. Hereviewed it and showed me how to find the square root of that big number on a sheet of paper.I then practiced until I had mastered it. Thank goodness 6 months later I found a pocketcalculator that had the MAGIC f(x) ( or 2 x ) symbol on it. Since then, I have never tried to do iton paper again. Now after hearing this story, is it any wonder that a lot of people in theconstruction industry won’t be able to do it the way that I am going to show you?OK, get a pen, paper, and a calculator that has the magic f(x) ( or 2 x ) symbol on it. If7

you are using an iPhone, turn your calculator app on and turn your phone sideways, you can seeit there as well. I am going to give you five actual building sizes and we are going to work onthem together. Practice these until you understand what you are doing. Then you will be ableto do any project once you have mastered it.8

How To Figure The Hypotenuse Of A Square Or Rectangular BuildingFirst, there is a formula for finding the hypotenuse of a triangle. What it comes downto is that if you know the lengths of two sides of a triangle, you can find the third length byusing this formula. If you cut a square or rectangle in half from one corner to the other, youwill end up with two triangles. Here’s the actual formula:A2 B2 C2A One side of the building.B Another side of the buildingC The unknown distance from one corner of the building to the other diagonal corner of the building.Problem 1The first example is a building 300 feet, 0 inches by 280 feet, 0 inches.The first thing you do is to square the sides. All that little raised 2 in the formula above meansis that the number is multiplied by itself.Side A is 300 feet. 300 x 300 90,000. A2 90,000Side B is 280 feet. 280 x 280 78,400. B2 74,800Add A B 168,400. C2 168,400Now, with 168,400 in your calculator simply punch in for the f square root (or 2 x).You now have 410.36569. Which means your diagonal is 410.36569 (and a long string of trailingnumbers) feet.It’s 410 feet long, but how many inches does the .36569 come out to?With this number on your machine, subtract the 410, which will leave you with .36569* inches.What percent of .36569 is 12 inches?To find this, you simply multiply that number by 12 (inches) and you will get 4.38828 inches.Okay, it’s 4 inches, but what about that fraction of inches left over? If you want to measure to9

the 1/8th of an inch, subtract the 4, which leaves you with .38828 (and a long string of trailingnumbers).Multiply that by 8. This gives you 3.1062 (and a long string of trailing numbers).You can now simply round it up to 3. So now we have 3/8 inches.The answer is 410 feet, 4 and 3/8 inches.Do you understand?We’ll do some more, then you make up more numbers for buildings and you simply practiceuntilyou understand how to find the right answer for any building size that is a square or rectangularshaped building. Here we go.Problem 2A building 60 feet by 30 feet.60 x 60 3,60030 x 30 900Added together and you get 4,500Hit the square root key and you get 67.082039 feet. Subtract the 67, which leaves .082039inches. Multiply that by 12 and you get .984468 inches. Basically, that’s super close to 1 inchand you don’t need to go further.The answer is 67 feet, 1 inch.Problem 3A building is 100 feet even by 150 feet even.100 x 100 10,000150 x 150 22,500Added together 32,500Hit the square root key and you get 180.27756 feet. Subtract 180 and you get .27756 inches.Multiply that by 12 (inches) and you get 3.33076 inches. Subtract the 3 inches and you10

get .33076. Multiply .33076 by 8 (to get the nearest 1/8th inch) and you get 2.64. Round it up to3 and you get 3/8th of an inch.180 feet, 3 & 3/8th inches. This is really close to the ½ inch mark and you could use that aswell.Note: If you want to go to the 1/8th of an inch you multiply that final fraction by 8. If youwant to go to the nearest ¼ of an inch, you would multiply it by 4, and if you wanted to getdown to the 16th of an inch you would multiply it by 16.Problem 4A building is 24 feet by 12 feet.24 x 24 57612x12 144,Add those together 720Hit the square root key and you get 26.832815’. Subtract the26.8328 feet. Subtract 26 feet, and you have .8328% of 12 inches. Multiply that and you get9.99378 inches. .99378 is so close to 10 inches, you don’t need to go any further.The answer is 26 feet, 10 inches.Now the last example will be about as hard as you will ever encounter.Problem 5A building is 88 feet, 8 inches by 100 feet, 8 inches.I always do everything as close to perfect as possible. I even figure concrete and grout by thecubic inch to get exact yardage. I convert the above to inches, and then square it. You could call8 inches 2/3, .67, or .68 but it won’t be perfect. Let’s consider all of the other trades who willshow up after you do and do it perfectly.Here is how to convert feet to inches.11

One foot is 12 inches. 88 feet x 12 inches 1,056 inches. But it was 88 feet PLUS 8 inches, so weadd another 8 inches to that and get 1064 inches. Now we square that: 1064 inches x 1064inches 1,132,096 inches100 feet x 12 inches 1200 inches, plus another 8 inches 1208. We square that and get 1,459,264 inches.Add 1,132,096 1,459,264 2,591,360.The square root of that 1609.7701 inchesDivide by 12 (inches) 134.1475.Subtract 134 feet .1475 inches. Multiply that 12 (inches) to get 1.7701 inches.Subtract 1 inch to get .7701, multiply by 8 (to get down to 1/8th of an inch) to get 6.1608,rounded to 6. You get 6/8th inch, which can be further reduced to ¾. Inch.Your final answer is 134 feet, 1 and ¾ inches.The dotted lines equal the Hypotenuse, or the diagonals.Got it? Keep practicing!12