You can waste a lot of plywood if you don't make a cut diagram or cutting plan before slicing into a piece of plywood. One of the most common errors is not thinking about which way the grain of the surface wood is going. In some projects, especially with veneer finished plywoods, this is critic...
Last year we had a viewer who had a burn hole in a counter top from a hot pot. We showed how you can use the router to cut out the burn and create a recessed hole for a tile or a cutting board. See "The Plunging Router meets the counter top burn" .This year we got the same question again but th...
Aside from the old fashioned mortise and tennon, or the longer tongue and groove, about the only way that craftsmen could join two boards together without hardware was to use dowels. Dowel joints were never precise, even though I have three different doweling jigs sitting on my shelf. But then ...
When our camera was out in the renovation centre, one viewer posed the problem of having a cedar fence with the top foot rotten but the rest in good shape. Of course this was probably caused by a square top cut not being protected by a fence post cap. Look around and you will see that most fenc...
How do you repair damage in a laminate floor since the decoration is actually very thin?The putty solutionYou could gouge out the problem and apply a hard putty. Plastic Wood won't stick well enough but you could use some non-shrinking wood fillers which are not quite as strong but take stain be...
You want to make a Lazy Susan?Here are some working tips.To draw a large circle put a screw through a long stick or yard stick and drill a hole for a pencil. When you use this for drawing the circle, you also have defined the centre of the circle with the depression made by the screw pivot.Find ...
You see a lot of TV advertising these days for what is called a rotary tool, this is like a small drill that takes all kinds of different bits with small 1/8th inch shanks.Very similar machines are made by Dremmel, Sears and Black & Decker. Are they really worthwhile.Yes.The key is the wide ...
No matter what you want to do with a router, you need some way to control and guide it. This is true even with free hand lettering. Notice in the first picture how I anchor my hands down to the wood so that either one of them is almost stationary while the other moves, or both are dragging alon...
Wood turners like to cut wood right out of the forest and turn them into bowls, plates and the like. But since they start with green wood, there will be a lot of shrinkage and potential cracking before they get to a finished product.Traditionally they debark the wood and then rough turn the shap...
When you are working on getting trim to fit tightly around a window, be sure to perfect the mitre corners first, and then cut the square length last. That way, if you have to adjust the mitre, you still have enough length to the wood to fit the other end.One way to assure a perfect fit is to rou...
