10 beginner scroll saw tips

hey gang i'm scott and welcome to my little workshop today i'm sharing with you my top 10 scroll saw tips i wish i knew when i started welcome back number one do not be afraid of your saw yes when you first start using the saw blades will break a lot and one might get caught in the blade and chatter but i consider the scroll saw one of the safest tools in the shop that has the word saw in it can you cut yourself absolutely but it'll give you a band-aid cut um it'd be like being scared of books because you're scared of paper cuts um i saw another video where people were warning about removing the hold down on the front here because uh you could cut your fingers off that's simply not the case so respect your saw but don't be scared of it number two finding patterns when i first started in the late 80s we had books and magazines and a few mail order resources today we still have all of those but we have so many online resources including a lot of videos here on youtube and how to make your own i usually send people over to steve good's page the scroll saw workshop he has enough patterns to keep you busy forever it's a great resource i'll have a link to his page and others in the description number three checking for square most saws have the ability to pitch the table to one side or both sides so you can cut at an angle but most of the time when you're cutting at least me personally i want to cut with a 90 degree angle so to check for square i'm going to make two cuts i'm going to make a cut i'm going to flip it over and make another cut so we have two cuts here if they are parallel to each other it's a good indication that the table is square another thing i like to do real quick when i'm making stuff but a little piece of scrap wood i will cut out a puzzle key [Music] [Music] like so now with that little key there if i can bring it down and then feed it in from the top and it goes through we know that we're square and it's just a quick check um it's something i'll do while i'm cutting throughout the day um you can always start out with a machinist square i'm just taking this ruler here i do have a machinist square i'm not quite sure where it is at the moment and then you can just set it up on the table and then check to make sure your blade is square all right number four getting the patterns on the wood is a pretty crucial thing uh there's there's several ways to do it we'll just go over a few real quick um the easiest simplest thing would just be to draw whatever you want to cut out on the wood um you could take a physical pattern put a piece of carbon paper underneath and then trace over the top that will also work well you can make a template and then just lay it on the wood and just trace around it this temple this template is made out of uh some press board this is actually uh the inside of like a three ring binder i just said later on so there we go we now have our our duck on our pattern ready to go i don't know why i decided to do ducks but i'm pretty happy i did so we got a duck there um what i do most of the time is this is blue painters tape i'll use blue papers tape sometimes packaging tape sometimes i'll just glue the pattern right to the wood well for this example i got blue painters tape i have a box here this is my box that i let me swing this over here a little bit there we go this is my box that i use for the spray adhesive it catches all the overspray what i like to do is take the pattern put a little kink in it that way you have something to grab now we are using super 77 it's right there there you go 3m super 77 i've used a lot of spray adhesives in my life uh i always come back to super 77 there you go we'll let that sit for a couple seconds just waiting for it to tack up a little bit now i'm starting to be able to pick it up with my finger like that now the duck pattern i'm going to look for the the flat nicest side when i made the pattern i made the bottom flat so that mr duck will sit nice we'll sit up nice on his own the original pattern he was round on the bottom but if he is round he would want to tip over so there you go so this one's ready to cut and then uh another way of doing it would be uh just take your your laser engraver you have laying around and just laser engrave the pattern on simple right there you go that works of course i'm kidding all right uh slightly later in time scott i i forgot to tell you you just pull the tape off when you're done which makes sense uh if you glue directly to the wood what you would use is mineral spirits just spray on top of the pattern it'll go through the paper and dissolve the glue then you can just peel the pattern right off and wipe it off if you are using mineral spirits please please please let it dry completely before you do something silly like uh make a piece of fret work and then uh use the mineral spirits and then flip it over and thinking it's dry and use a torch to burn some fuzzies off the back and next thing you know you have a big flaming piece of fretwork uh not that i've ever done that twice so there you go be safe kids and let's get back to it number five think of your patterns as a guide they're not absolute you know if you're not making something intricate if you're not exactly on the line it's not going to be end of the world you know try to glide back you know take your time going back into your line don't do anything sharp or jagged otherwise it's going to be all jagged so you know do the best you can but just because something goes off the line a little bit it's not the end of the world you know this is supposed to be fun number six stack cutting if you're going to cut multiple copies of one pattern on thinner wood stack cutting is a great time saver i don't have anything really laid out for that but i'll demonstrate different ways of putting the wood together so if you have you can cut out two ducks you can cut out two ducks at once you can wrap the outside and tape around the outside depending on what you're cutting this one would probably work just wrap tape around the outside just to hold them together um you can also use nails um obviously with a this is cherry i'd pre-drill and then put a nail in at least three places uh depending on your design and uh double-sided tape carpet tape if it's something like this carpet tape would be great it would really hold on you're gonna have to clean it off any residue back with the mineral spirits again double sided tape also works great and then you can make two at once all right so i have uh i put in one two three four five nails and i'm looking at this and i'm gonna start with uh the bill over here i'm gonna cut this part out first i'm gonna come around and then cut out this so that will give me support all the way to the bill here so we'll cut that out now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] there we go and then we have we have four little ducks number seven is uh using a waste block when you're drilling your holes for internal cuts yeah it's not really a thing to do with the scroll saw but it is you're constantly drilling holes so if you use a waste board underneath [Music] you're not going to get tear out and tear heart tear out can ruin your project so you know what i do is first i make sure that i'm not drilling into my table typically i have this clamp down but for this demonstration i don't [Music] so there you go you know you can be fancy and cut out something really nice that fits in there or you can just slap a piece of wood down as long as it supports it so there you go that was number seven all right number eight cutting a straight line on the scroll saw i'm not going to get into blades and everything but i thought i'd just mention that if you're going to be cutting a straight line you're going to be cutting it actually at an angle you know the scroll saw is all feel you don't have a fence or a sled or anything and it takes time to get a feel for cutting so if you can't cut a straight line don't be too frustrated about it um i'm just gonna demonstrate here you know this would be a straight line for me [Applause] [Music] so i don't know if you can tell how much of an angle i am but uh i am quite a bit at an angle right now uh this would be this would be straight right here in order to cut we're cutting at an angle like this i wish somebody would told me that because it got a little frustrating when i first started number nine foot switches i use a foot switch to uh run my scroll saw and my drill press and my vacuum cleaner it allows you for the scroll saw it allows you to have two hands on your material when you stop and start if you're doing a lot of internal cuts it's a lot easier to turn the saw off with your foot the main reason i use them and my beautiful crocs is to save wear and tear on the power switch so there's two types of switches there is a momentary or a dead man switch which means you push your foot down it runs you take your foot off it shuts off and then there's a power maintain switch which is basically click one to turn the saw on click again to shut it off so this switch here is a power maintain switch so click it on [Applause] and it vibrates this off and the camera click it again to shut it off now this one over here is a dead man you can hear the saw turn on and off they both work well um i've used both it depends on what you're doing if i'm doing a lot of fret work where i'm doing very tiny little cuts and i'm doing hundreds of them i will put the momentary switch onto the saw just so it's on and off on and off on and off tapping my foot like uh running a sewing machine um so it's all personal preference but it's kind of nice and uh i wish somebody would have told me about these when i first started so that's why they made the list number 10 the magnifier with age comes grace and uh bad eyesight so a lighted uh magnifier comes in very handy and the magnifier just does does just that it magnifies things makes things easier to see um this one here i believe i have a 3x lens and it came with two this one has a led ring light on the bottom with three different levels and two different temperatures so i use the bright temperature for um when i'm live streaming and when i'm by myself i'll use the warmer temperature it's a little bit easier on the eyes this one i got at menards um it was pricey you could get them on amazon for relatively cheap prior to this i always use the old style that had the big light bulb on the top that you would screw in and basically back in the day when you had an incandescent bulb you're basically making your table top into an easy bake oven uh now it's not an issue you just put an led or a fluorescent bulb in there and away you go um so yeah magnifiers they're great so that's it we made it through our very first video on this channel so since this is my first video well other than the intro video i'm going to be asking you to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down feel free to leave a comment i would really appreciate that and if you liked the video and want to see more please subscribe and if you want to be notified ring the bell but you've watched enough youtube videos where you already know that so i'm not gonna harp on you guys about that so i would like an outro thing to say so if you can think of anything awesome like uh i don't know like see you later or be kind to people just stay six feet away something like that that would work let me know if you got any ideas but i'm babbling so i'm going to let this end right now so thank you so much for watching and we'll catch you next time

Channel: scott snyder

Views: 32,474

Rating: 4.9664302 out of 5

Keywords: Scroll saw, scroll saw projects, Scroll saw, scroll saw for beginners, woodworking, wood, scrollsaw, scroll saw for beginners, scroll saw for beginners youtube, scroll saw projects for beginners, diy

Id: IL4kBC4989w

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020