Tricks of the Trade

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.

Sharpening the bevel of a drawknife can be a challenge. Lap the flat side then use this method to do the bevel side. Using 3⁄8” or 1⁄2” or 3⁄4” PEX …

I am making a bed headboard which requires multiple mortise and tenon joints on different wood thicknesses. I am routing my mortises and seeing the stop line that was laid out for the mortise was [...]

I often lubricate the soles of my planes with paraffin wax to make them slide easier. While ripping a board that was insistent on pinching just enough to make sawing difficult, it occurred to me [...]

Shop-Made Rocker Jaw One simple board, cut into the shape of a seesaw, can make a huge improvement to your vise. It allows you to firmly hold tapered work and long, upright boards off to the side [...]

To make a quick and easy drying rack, or to raise a project off your bench while applying a finish, use blocks of rigid foam insulation and drywall screws. For stability, the screws should be no [...]