This past week while working on a project for a client I found myself doing quite a bit of math on something that most people would just glance right over when looking at a piece of furniture. These features are evenly spaced slats.
Anyone who has done any kind of woodworking, fence building, etc. knows what its like trying to make everything look evenly spaced. So, I sat down and tried to recall what I learned throughout my time in high school algebra to come up with several formulas that make this process easier. These formulas are:
These three formulas make it very easy to find all the measurements that you'll need when you're in the situation that I was in. Each of the formulas is labeled for what it solves for, but it may be helpful to go over what each term actually means. Desired spacing is how far apart you want each slat to be. Number of slats is simply how many slats you are going to have. Finally, the total gap is how long or wide the section is that you are trying to cover.
I found these formulas to be very effective while working, but I did learn a few lessons while using them. First, I learned that very rarely will you come up with common measurements. Most of the time you will get very close to a common measurement, but you'll be a couple thousands of on inch off. It is possible to make it work in this situation though. Lets say you were using the formula that solves for slat spacing and the spacing that it comes up with is .732 inch space between each slat. You may be wondering how would I find this on my tape measure or ruler? Your first impression may even be to just round it on up to .75 inches, or 3/4", because this is a measurement that is easily found. You won't want to do this though. That two thousandths or hundredths of an inch may not seem like a lot, but as you work your way along it will compound itself and throw off your final slat dramatically. So, if you find yourself in this situation where the measurement that it comes up with is not on your tape measure then I would suggest either cutting your slats slightly smaller or making your gap slightly smaller than 3/4 inch. What I normally do when attaching slats is make two spacer blocks. These blocks are cut at the dimension that I want my gaps to be, and I use them to insure that each slat is evenly spaced apart. I would then make sure that these spacer blocks are a few 16ths or 32nds shy of 3/4". If that example is a little confusing then just remember to always round down.
I even went into Microsoft Excel and made some calculators with these equations so that you wouldn't even have to do the math and I will attach those below. If you don't have excel then it wouldn't be hard to just do the math on your calculator.
So, what does all this really mean? Mainly I think it means that we owe some apologies to our teachers, because the excuse of, "We'll never use this in the real world," is thrown around a lot. We may think that solving for x and y may seem pointless, but it is the principle of that exercise that is important. Especially with algebra, as it gets used weekly if not daily even when we’re not thinking about it. Lastly, I hope these formulas and calculators help you in your projects, and that you listen and learn when someone is trying to teach you something!
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