Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The tool is precise, easy to use, fairly durable (it will scratch). The dial gauge is very tiny and you can only read to about 1 degeree of accuracy at best, if you have good eyes and light. You must be careful of parallax also. For mitered inside corners parallax is a major issue and really hurts the ultimate accuracy of the tool. Even with these issues, this tool is less valuable than it may seem.
The main purpose fo the 18" and 23" true angle tool is for installing crown, chair rail and base mouldings. It is used to determine the true wall angle so your mitered joints match the wall angle. Some may even try to tell you that the difficult part of moulding installation (tight joints) will be easy now.
I can tell you the worst wall I measured was 91 degrees. Ok, 1 degreee will produce a gap. So it makes sense that a more precise measurement will correct this. right? wrong. The biggest "out of square" is not wall to wall. It is #1 the straightness of the ceiling that will impact these joints the most. Notice I said "most". Because the wall to wall, the ceiling to wall, straigntness of the wall and straightness of the ceiling ALL throw off prefectly mitered joints.
There are many tricks that are somewhat effective to making tight mitered joints but even if you have some good ones, you will have some bad ones.
The real answer is to forget this tool and cope. I resisted coping because it is not fun and is time consuming. AND you will STILL neeed to caulk ceiling and wall joints. Even perfect mitered or coped joints do not eliminate caulk. Your walls and ceiling will not be prefectly flat even if they are exactly 90 degrees.
So make coping easier by using a Easy Coper jig and a jig saw with a fine blade. You will get fast work, decent joints (Always because coped joints are more forgiving). It is structurally much better so even if the house settles or wood changes size, the worst you will get is a crack in the paint. Easily fixable.
HOWEVER, for outside corners it does help some. Again, all of the outside corners in my house were within 1 degree of square. And the biggest difficulty is the ceiling and wall straightness, NOT angle. So to get tight outside joints was still using glue, forcing boards to fit and then nailing them in place.
I consider the 18"/23" useless for moulding unless your walls are greatly out of square.
I do think the 7" version could be a handy tool, just not for moulding installs.
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The Original True Angle tool is the worlds fastest and easiest angle making tool available. Just rotate the blades and read the dial. The hairline locates the exact angle within a tolerance of 5/1000ths. The blades rotate 360 degrees in both directions. To lock the blades, lightly tighten the finger nut. To unlock the blades rotate the top blade counterclockwise. The Original True Angle replaces every triangle, protractor, try square, bevel square, rafter square, framing square, combination square, or any other angle making template presently manufactured anywhere in the world.
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