Need a third hand to hold the other end of something up in the air, or level with a beam, while you are struggling to get the opposite end hammered in at the correct position.You could just drop a couple of nails into the top of the floating piece and bend them over so that they hang from the oth...
If you have followed me for a few years you know that I hate tape measurers, just because I hate making mistakes. That is why I love jigs.When you want to drill all those evenly spaced holes in the cabinet sides, and all four support pins have to line up with each other or else the shelf will wo...
There are times, especially when working with moulding, that you need to divide an angle in half. I learned how to do this with a compass in high school and since then I have fallen in love with the Angle Finder, an impressive little device that uses more geometry than my compass to measure exac...
After selling us knock down furniture for many years now, we can finally buy that special connecting hardware ourselves.There are two basic types: sunken nuts, and cams.The principle of a sunken nut, as you see in the first photo, is that you have a little cylinder that has a threaded hole throug...
The mortise & tenon was the basic woodworking joint used before the advent of modern fasteners -- and since. It has been used in everything from barn building to fine furniture. If you have ever tried to make this matched pair by hand you might have been frustrated by simply not having the ...
Driving a screw directly into wood forces the grain of the wood apart. Soft wood will crush a lot and allow the screw to force its way through. Hard wood is much more likely to simply split when the screw forces its way between the wood fibres. Either hard or soft wood will split when you scre...
We got this question from a store customer who was trying to decide which blade to buy?Wobble Washer Dado BladeThe first photo shows what we call a "wobble washer" blade. Actually the blade itself isn't wobbly, but the washers on both sides are bevelled. You can rotate them to skew the blade in...
Clamps are used widely in woodworking and metal working, in fact in every task that needs to hold two pieces of something together temporarily. Clamps come in every imaginable size and shape. In fact, if you are looking for a present for someone who has a workshop of some kind, any clamp from c...
Mark in Mississauga has a semi-circular staircase and he has to replace the floor moldings that will make a semi-circle. How to bend the moldings?Water or steam will allow most wood to bend, and is especially effective with oak.The Pipe SoakerOne simple rig is simply to take a large PVC drain pi...
Lorin from Toronto, Ontario, asks for help on how to get baseboards off without breaking them.First, cut the paint line between the baseboard and the wall. This will avoid chipping the paint on the wall.Work with two thin wedges and a 1/4 inch backer board. Force one wedge into the crack betwee...
