Tricks of the Trade

Here’s a dirt-simple but effective accessory for your miter saw. It eliminates tear-out, allows you to make precision cuts by aligning a pencil mark with the kerf, and provides room to screw or [...]

Crawling around under the basement stairs to find what may or may not be in this box or that was a pain. However, leaving the space empty was not an option. I built this cart to make use of every [...]

To set the height of a router bit—within .001″, if necessary—I made this simple stand for my caliper. It works on a router table or a hand-held router. Two screws with washers secure the [...]

A friend needed a small tool to clean out glue inside small places. So I made him a mini-scraper using an indexable blade from my planer, screwed to a turned handle. Each blade is about $3, plus [...]

I had a project on which I needed to rout out a large area about 3⁄8” deep. It was a wooden case for a Nook reader, and the eReader had to fit into the excavation. I had …

Who says you can’t put a square peg in a round hole?  My scrap bin is made from round cardboard tubes made for concrete forms. These tubes are available at home centers; they’re [...]

Bottle Cap Jig Knobs I’m always trying to use up scraps and stuff that would otherwise end up in the trash. My latest devices are jig knobs made with plastic bottle caps, which have a grippy [...]

“You can’t have too many clamps,” a wise cabinetmaker once said. That is certainly true, but in a small shop, you can easily run out of room to store them. On clamp is so different from [...]

Find magic in the mundane using this humble problem solver. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a woodworker is to never underestimate the seemingly mundane. I have found great [...]

When buying supplies for my shop, I often visit a store where stuff costs around $1. Many items sell for much more at a home improvement store, so I save a pile of money. You never know what [...]

While making Shaker boxes, I built a jig to accurately rip 1/16″ thick strips without getting my hands too close to the blade. In fact, I can leave the guard on the saw. The jig has two [...]

Here’s a hi-tech way to set your tablesaw’s miter gauge to within 1/10 of 1° of any angle. It really works well for cutting picture-frame miters. The key is to use a digital angle gauge. I bought [...]