Building Tripods for Dummies

tripod easel

We've noticed that a lot of the freelancers who grabbed "how to make..." titles at eHow.com didn't have a clue what they were talking about. All they'd do was find a website somewhere that they thought contained the necessary instructions and just reword it. On way to many occasions, though, the eHow contributors were so unfamiliar with the projects that they left out critical information or omitted a step, rendering their post useless. That's what happened today, when Sue Stepp attempted to explain "How to Build a Tripod Easel"¹ in a post that's now been niched over at OurPastimes.com.

Stepp's unfamiliarity with woodworking of any flavor is pretty obvious from the get-go, given that her list of "Things You'll Need" begins with this mashup:

"4 wood studs, 1 inch by 3 inches by 8 feet "

No one here has ever heard of a 1-by-3 "stud," although we imagine that Big Bad Wolf Construction, LLC, would be happy to use them in building Little Piggy houses. We're well aware that someone at eHow didn't understand "1-by-3" or "2-by-4," so demanded that every piece of lumber be given a name; but why Stepp and her content editor couldn't settle for the usual "plank" is beyond us. Just how little the two of them knew about dimensional lumber is pretty clear later on when Sue said to,

"...draw a line on the 1 inch side of each stud..."

Apparently, neither of them knew that the narrow dimension of a 1-by-3 is actually ¾"... Of course, that pales alongside Stepp's notion of forming a tripod. It goes something like this:

1. Drill a ¼-inch hole three inches from the top of each of three 1-by-3s
2. Line the holes up in the 1-by-3s and thread a 4-inch carriage bolt through the hole, place a wing nut on the end.
3. Stand the tripod up.

That last Stepp step? It ain't gonna happen. since the three legs are all in a line instead of a triangle: what an idiot.

Sue also said to use a carriage bolt, and put a washer on both ends. Looks like our Dumbass of the Day doesn't know what a carriage bolt looks like, either...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6599662_build-tripod-easel.html

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