Story Pole: Framing Calculator

About Story Pole: Framing Calculator

Story Pole is a construction calculator that does feet-inch-fraction arithmetic exactly, and tells you when it cannot.

A story pole is a board marked once with every height on a job, so nothing gets re-measured and no error accumulates. This app is that board.

WHAT IT WORKS OUT

Triangles. Rise, run, diagonal, angle — give it any two and it gives you the rest, with the pitch and the area. It says when the answer is exact: a 3-4-5 or a 5-12-13 comes out whole and it tells you so. Oblique triangles too, and when two triangles fit your measurements it shows both rather than picking one.

Roof framing. Common, hip, valley and jack rafters. Line length, ridge deduction, cut length, plumb and seat cuts, HAP, tail, jack common difference, cheek cut. Pitch as rise, degrees or percent, all three linked so they cannot disagree.

Compound mitre. The two numbers you dial into the saw, for any spring angle in any corner — not just 52/38 crown at 90 degrees, which is all the printed tables cover. Walls are rarely square.

Stairs. Every valid riser count, ranked. Riser, tread, total run, pitch. The full stringer mark table with framing-square settings, the cut list, and every check against your own limits.

Layout. Studs and joists on centre with the three-quarter-inch first-stud offset, so a sheet still breaks on a stud. Baluster spacing under a maximum gap. Arcs. Squaring, and which corner to move.

Framing. Rake walls stud by stud with the constant common difference and the top cut. Openings: header length, kings, trimmers, cripples, sill.

Shapes. Circles, rings, ellipses, trapezoids, and polygons with the mitre angle for each corner. Plus a room whose four walls are four different lengths.

Materials. Concrete, board feet, sheet goods, decking, flooring, roofing, paint. Waste on each, and an order-this-much line in whole units.

Cut lists. How many sticks to buy with the blade counted, and whether longer stock buys fewer. The saving is usually in the length, not the packing.

Convert and weigh. Yards, roofing squares, acres, litres — and what a load of gravel weighs before it goes in the truck.

WHY IT IS DIFFERENT

It is exact. Every length is an exact fraction, not a decimal that drifts. A millimetre is exactly five one-hundred-and-twenty-sevenths of an inch, because the inch is defined as 25.4mm.

It admits when it rounds. A figure that is not exact wears a small mark; tap it for the exact fraction and what was lost. Where a figure came out of trigonometry and has no exact form, it says that instead — rather than offering a fraction that is an approximation in disguise.

Which matters. Round a riser to the nearest sixteenth and add it fifteen times and you finish three eighths short of the floor. Story Pole marks every stringer height from the bottom, so the top mark lands exactly.

It shows the work. Every result opens to the formula that produced it, every value labelled. Check it against the square in your pocket.

It refuses. When nothing fits your constraints it names the one in the way and the smallest change that fixes it. And where a question belongs to the code and the engineer rather than to arithmetic — header sizing, spans, loads — it says so instead of guessing.

BUILT FOR A JOB SITE

Pay once. No subscription, no in-app purchase, no advertising.

It collects nothing. No account, no analytics, no network permission at all. Nothing you type leaves the phone, because there is nowhere for it to go. It works with no signal, because it never needed one.

A Sun theme for bright light: black on white, heavier rules, every pairing above seven to one.

Metric throughout, not bolted on: a metric flight is marked to the millimetre, not to sixteenths of an inch.

Your code limits are yours — editable defaults, not law. Your jurisdiction is the authority, not this app.

Story Pole works out the arithmetic and geometry you ask for. Check every figure against your own measurements and your local code before you cut.