I don’t have a compound miter saw, but I figured out how to cut the compound bevel needed at the top and bottom of splayed legs. My answer is to use my basic miter saw and a piece of scrap.…
“Measure twice cut once” is probably the most commonly passed-on bit of woodworking advice. With that in mind, we’ve gathered some of our favorite tips to make measuring easier, [...]
Now that arthritis has a grip on me, I have trouble getting a good grip on clamp handles. My solution is easy and costs nothing. I carve grooves lengthwise on the handles using a medium-sized [...]
Understanding the Why is just as important as the How. Hand tools are a pleasure to use-if they’re sharp. Once you have a sharp tool in your hands, you’ll begin to realize why some [...]
Floor Sweep Dust Port My router table is probably the most-used tool in my shop. I have dust collector ports on the fence, but when I rout with a bearing-guided bit, it still makes a huge mess. [...]
My oscillating spindle sander’s auxiliary table makes quick work of edge sanding short boards and forming perfect circles. Make the table from melamine or a laminate-covered material and fasten [...]
I devised a new way to fit a shelf into a dado. I use my router to make a tiny adjustment to the shelf’s thickness instead of fine-tuning my dado set with shims to match the plywood’s thickness. [...]
Pattern-Cut Finials The traditional way to make a square finial on a bandsaw is to mark and cut the pattern on one side of the blank, then tape the offcut back on to the blank in order to guide [...]
Staple Set Pneumatic staplers don’t always set 1/4” crown staples flush. Driving them the rest of the way with a hammer causes the staples to kink, so I designed this easy-to-make tool, which I [...]
Being an impatient sort, waiting for glue to reach the bottle’s spout became a pet peeve of mine. To put an end to this, I made a stand with a hole in the top matching the diameter of the [...]
When stropping my plane and chisel blades for that final honing, I always want to be sure that there is little to no chance that a freshly sharpened blade will slide off of the strop and [...]
There’s never enough storage space in a shop, is there? When I recycled some old kitchen cabinets to use in my shop, I added one more drawer to each one—in the toe-kick space.