Bargain Screw Lube

A toilet bowl floor gasket is an excellent lubricant for screws–much better than paraffin, soap, or all of the other materials I’ve tried. It’s very soft, so all you have...

Suction Box

If your shop is inside or attached to your house, you know that migrating sawdust is a problem, especially if you do a lot of power carving.  To minimize dust,...

Drill Press Sharpening System

Here’s a fast, inexpensive way to keep your edge tools razor sharp. First, cut out a few 5″ x 3/4″ MDF discs.  Drill a 1/4″ hole in the center of...

Pin Board Marking Jig

My task: 28 kitchen drawers of different sizes, all with hand-cut dovetails. The thought of laying these out was overwhelming, so I designed a jig to simplify the process. To...

Precision Depth Gauge

My dovetail jig doesn’t have a depth gauge, and with my engineering background, I like things to be precise. This depth gauge allows me to set my router bits to...

Adjustable Board Support

In the good old days, when a woodworker wanted to plane a board’s edge, he’d clamp one end in the bench’s face vise and support the cantilevered end with a...

Self-Cleaning Blast Gate

When sawdust got packed into the back end of my planer’s blast gate, I couldn’t close the gate all the way.  I solved this annoying problem by cutting a notch...

Cabinet Jacks

I usually work alone, but when I install upper cabinets, I always enlist the help of two shop-made cabinet jacks. They’re steadier than an extra pair of hands. The jacks...

Marble Solitaire Game Board

Create a classic in an afternoon. Whenever I visited my grandmother, I got to play a game with marbles on a round wooden board. My grandmother called it “Marble Solitaire.”...

A Shop with a View

A Shop with a View A few years ago, I moved to a Colorado mountain area on five acres, which gave me plenty of room to build my dream shop,...

Clamp Spacers

While I was gluing up the pedestals for an oak desk, I realized I needed a way to hold the sides parallel at the front. Three Quick-Grip clamps and a...

No-Fuss Flush Trimming

My flush-trimming setup allows trimming veneer and solid wood edging up to 7/8-in. thick. It consists of a router with a 1/2-in. straight bit, a table and a perpendicular fence....