Tricks of the Trade

Here’s a great space-saving tip. I first made “floor drawers” like these for under-the-bed storage. They worked so well I decided to use them in the shop. Floor drawers work great for storing [...]

Flattening the back of a spokeshave’s blade on sandpaper is a pain. The blade is so small that it’s hard to get a grip on it. A 1-1/2″ thick MDF block sized to fit my hand makes [...]

Sooner or later, the wooden runners of your tablesaw jigs will wear and become sloppy, resulting in inaccurate cuts. Having just replaced my kitchen floor, I’ve made new runners using some extra [...]

I needed a sacrificial fence for cutting rabbets with my tablesaw. All of the designs I’d seen required drilling holes in my saw’s fence or positioning clamps strategically out of the way of the [...]

Epoxy is a two-part glue: a hardener and a resin that combine to form a hard, durable plastic. It’s important to follow the manufacturer’s recommendations and use correct ratios of resin and [...]

If you’ve had trouble grinding a straight edge on a chisel or plane iron, try using your disc sander. All you need is a guide that slides in your sander’s miter gauge slot and an 80 or 100-grit [...]

Toggle clamps are great for all sorts of jigs and fixtures. However, you need a wrench to adjust the length of their posts. To make life easier, replace the clamp’s hex nut with a wing nut. [...]

Drilling small pieces on the drill press can be difficult because most clamps won’t reach to the center of the table. This simple three-piece platform jig solves the problem and ensures a fast [...]

My beam compass is perfect for drawing huge arcs. It’s super easy to make, and I can adjust it quickly without using screws or clamps. To change the arc’s radius, I just slide a [...]

As hard as I try to avoid it, every now and then I need to mill a small part on the router table. I’ve learned the hard way that you should never hold that part by hand, for three good …

The fastest way to rabbet the back of a cabinet is to do it all at once, after the cabinet is assembled. Unlike rabbeting individual pieces before assembly, I don’t have to worry about where to [...]

Achieving exact thickness is really important when making splines to reinforce box corners. The splines have to fit perfectly in the saw kerfs—a few thousandths of an inch one way or the other [...]