Comment by hyperthesis
2 years ago
> In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I don’t think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out)
What was it?
2 years ago
> In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I don’t think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out)
What was it?
The biggest problem I see is that the part of the board you need to cut off intersects the ground. If you're leaning the board on the ground, you need to somehow trace a line parallel to the ground several inches above it. Hopefully you can solve that by using a spare chunk of 2x6 and tracing along that. Similar story for the vertical joint.
I don't know if that's what the author meant, though.
You can’t rest the ladder against the wall and trace where to cut. Because the wall will stop the ladder.
atan2() to the rescue.
Interestingly, as crude as the diagram is, you can feed it to ChatGPT's data analysis plugin and it will not only recognize what's depicted, but offer to calculate the cut angles for the 2x12s given the rise and run. I was pretty impressed that it recognized the problem without any prompting other than the image itself.
Trig was already mentioned. It's definitely not the answer to the question GP is asking.