A piece of thick plate glass is dead flat and it’s easy to use to align standard jointer knives that have gib screws. A couple of rare-earth magnets secured to the glass with double-sided tape [...]
Like many woodworkers, I own a basic half-blind dovetail jig, which I use only occasionally for making utility drawers. During the interim, I tend to forget the setup procedures and spacing [...]
Hole saws provide an inexpensive way to bore large holes, but they have a maddening tendency to clutch the drilled disk afterward. I’ve found that the best approach for removing a stuck disk from [...]
I needed a way to lift pieces off the surface of my bench for finishing, so I made some 3/4″ x 2″ x 3″ blocks and inserted 1/4″ x 1-1/4″ dowels into them. [...]
Whenever creating small pieces that include a routed detail of some sort, it’s best to do the routing on the larger “parent” board, and then separate the small piece from the larger. However, [...]
I have long used my car’s scissor jack for house and shop projects including lifting a settled deck and leveling workbenches. And when I needed to install a new set of cabinets in my shop, I [...]
Nobody likes wrapping up the last bit of finishing on a project and suddenly catching a run or imperfection you missed earlier. You can either ignore it, or more likely sand it down and fix the [...]
I needed to cut stopped grooves on a round surface – and while I could have cut them on the stock while it was square, then proceed to turn it on the lathe, I didn’t want to worry about catching [...]
I designed an outfeed support for my table saw that doesn’t take up any floor space. It’s made of plywood, hardwood and a store-bought roller. Three main design features enable it to work well. [...]
Sometimes you need to clamp parts that are out of reach of the throat depth of standard clamps. Here’s a design for a long-reach clamp that can be made from 2×4 lumber, 3⁄4” plywood or [...]
My shop is in a walkout basement with a steep grassy slope from the driveway. The skateboard-like devices made for moving stock work well on hard surfaces, but not on grass. My solution is an [...]