Tricks of the Trade

I made a go-anywhere task light by retrofitting an old, broken fixture with a new, battery-powered LED light. First, I removed the cord and inner workings from the task light. Then I screwed a [...]

Some high-end combination squares have a built-in lip or tab for the purpose of resting the tool hands-free on a piece of wood. But because most common combination squares lack this handy [...]

Drilling in melamine, plastic laminate, particleboard, or other abrasive materials dulls a steel countersink very quickly. So why not make it out of carbide? Thankfully, Amana did just that—they [...]

After ruining four $90 sheets of plywood by storing them on a damp floor, I came up with a simple fix: PVC feet. Cut several 12″ sections of 2″ dia. PVC pipe in half, lengthwise. [...]

For years, I sanded and hand planed panel edges by laying them flat on my workbench.  I could never quite squeeze a bench vise into my woodworking budget, so I came up with this fast, inexpensive [...]

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 [...]