Maths Lessons

I suspect there's not a school pupil in the land who has never sat in a maths lessons and sworn that they would never ever find a use in their adult life for algebra, trigonometry or any of the other baffling formulae you get made to learn.

That is until you come to build a conservatory with a pitched glazed roof on a model railway.

I have written on this blog before about how I have always been absolutely useless when it comes to working on angles on a model.

I usually proceed by trial and error, which can be a lengthy and frustrating way to proceed at the best of times, but when it comes to these delicate styrene fabrications I would really like to cut down on the faffing about as much as possible.

So the question I was pondering was how to make sure I make them right first time.

The answer I realised one morning as I was taking a shower (apologies if that's too much information) was good old Pythagoras's theorem.

In order to work out the size of the two main pieces, so they met neatly in the middle, all I needed to do was imagine the cross section of the roof as a right angle triangle and the piece I'm trying to make would be the hypotenuse.

QED!

Well, that's the theory at least.

Let's see what happens when I try to do it.