Projects

The next time you use your saber saw, forget about hauling out the sawhorses or cantilevering a hard-to-hold workpiece off your bench. Extruded polystyrene insulation board, the rigid pink sheets [...]

  My bench has only one vise, so it needs to be versatile. The jaws on my vise can be positioned to hold objects flat on the bench or cantilevered off the end. In addition, the clamp is [...]

  I use my biscuit joiner all the time to quickly make strong joints. With narrow boards like face frames, I used to spend a lot of time figuring out which biscuit size to use so the slots [...]

Crouching to operate my compressor's drain valve was no big deal until my football-ravaged knees started acting up. To keep from grimacing in the sawdust, I devised a more civilized way to [...]

Make this handy little gem for less than $5. You’ll need one piece of hardwood for the beam and another for the fence. You’ll also need two 1/4-20 threaded inserts and a thumbscrew. [...]

The Virtues of No. 1 Common Save money by using boards that aren’t perfect. By Tim Johnson and Ed Krause Want to make your head spin? Just try to figure out how hardwood lumber is [...]

t's tricky to keep clamping pads positioned when gluing curved surfaces, so I came up with these flexible pads. To make them, cut multiple kerfs in a piece of plywood. Next rip the plywood [...]

Bar clamps are great tools, but sometimes it's tough to get a good grip on the small wood handle. To get extra torque, I drilled a hole in the handle and inserted a dowel. It gives me a lot [...]

Whenever I need a small amount of glue, I reach for a paper cup. And since I visit the neighborhood coffee shop every morning, I always have a supply of used cups! But instead of filling the cup [...]

        Last fall while moving into a new house, I dropped my kitchen table off the back of my pickup truck.   The solid oak top suffered a serious crack near one corner. [...]

I love adjustable clamps, but I used to have trouble gripping and tightening the handles, especially at the end of a long day. Glued-on pieces of drawer liner ($5 per roll at most home centers) [...]

Recently, a friend asked me to reglue the buckled veneer in a tabletop. The problem was located too far from the edge to clamp with my longest handscrew, so I added wooden fingers to nearly [...]