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While lounging at the pool one afternoon, I had an inspiration. I “borrowed” one of my kids’ floating pool noodles, cut it into sections and used the pieces as universal connectors for vacuum [...]

My sharpening procedures involve a lot of buffing with compound. On one side of my buffer I’ve mounted a hard felt wheel, and on the other a paper wheel shaped to buff concave bevels. To prevent [...]

Over the years, I have often clamped stops on my drill-press fence to register hole locations in workpieces. Unfortunately, I always seemed to lose the stops. Flip stops always seemed like a good [...]

Many of us are familiar with the technique of using a razor blade to scrape away drips from varnish and other film finishes. It’s a great way to level defects, especially if you use a brand-new [...]

I find my stock band saw table too small to support many workpieces, so I outfitted it with a larger, auxiliary table. However, I wanted to be able to remove it quickly when I needed to utilize [...]

To create a planing stop on my workbench, I decided to go the simple route. I installed and countersunk a short row of #12 brass flathead screws near the edge of the bench, spacing them an inch [...]

If you do a lot of spray painting and finishing, but don’t have room for a permanent finishing bench, give this turntable a spin. It’s surprisingly sturdy and because it rotates, you can get to [...]

  Faced with cutting hundreds of plugs for a big project, I came up with this idea: I cut the plugs a little deeper than needed. Then I ran strips of masking tape down the faces of the [...]

I’ve bandsawn hundreds of puzzle pieces using very small blades. I gave up on the steel guide blocks that came with my saw because when those little blades come in contact with the blocks, they’d [...]

I make a lot of drawers in my shop and got tired of fiddling with squares and pinch rods to square up the boxes during assembly. I decided to build a squaring frame to make the job go much [...]

Like any table saw rip fence, mine needs occasional realignment to the blade. Because my miter gauge slots are aligned parallel to the blade, I just set my fence parallel to the right-hand slot. [...]

I’ve always had bad luck with really small drill bits–if I don’t break them, I lose them. I’ve stopped buying new ones, and now clip the heads off finish nails and use the nails [...]