6 Woodworking tips & tricks for beginners

so no matter what you do no matter if it's woodworking or anything else one of the best way to be efficient and get things done fast is by having tips and tricks and that's exactly what I'm going to show you some of these tips and tricks are things that you've probably seen but to be frank there's probably one that you haven't before we dive into this video I have a new project that I'm working on and I really need your input I'm thinking about creating a step-by-step online course about woodworking I want to make it something really useful to you so I'd love to hear from you there's a link to a short survey down in the video description if you're interested in learning how to make some of the projects on my channel please take a few minutes to fill out the brief survey and I look forward to seeing what you guys are interested in and with that said let's get to the tips but this tip I'm gonna show you how to make a really quick and simple Center marking gauge all you need is a piece of scrap wood to get started establish the line going down the center of that then mark off three points in the center and the two sides for the pins now if you want to make this even more simple and more approachable you could use two round head screws and put those in place of the pins that I have here and since this is supposed to be beginner friendly we're gonna assume that we don't have a drill press and we can't drill a hole straight so take a piece of scrap wood draw a straight line on it then use that piece of wood as a guide rest a bit up against it and keep it straight with the line so I know I didn't drill the two half-inch holes for the pin straight so what we're going to do here is use wood glue to hold them in place and finally just check to make sure it's squared on most marking gauge you're going to see a pencil for this one I'm going to use a screw and the main reason for that is durability and if you've never used one of these you're gonna love it just simply place it down on your subject and twist it to both pins touch all you want to do is drag it and create that line going right down the center now one of the upside of this being a screw is you can adjust the depth of your scribe so the more it protrudes the deeper to cut and could also mean a little harder to drag but you will get a deeper cut and you can always back it out so that you bear this quarter surface as shown this can mark multiple sides of materials as long as you have a parallel line going down on both sides you get that straight line going right down the center and one of the first things you're gonna pick up is some spring clamps because they're cheap and then you're gonna take them home and realize you don't use them as much at least I don't so I'm gonna show you how to get an extra use out of these without just leaving them in the corner collecting sawdust so these banded clamps shine really well when you need to attach a piece of trim where they work is you apply your glue I mean you just put that down and the rubber here actually does a really great job of holding this piece down so it doesn't move and it's really hard to use a bar clamp because this tends to want to ship that been said I'm gonna basically try to duplicate what this clamp is doing with these are you going to need is some spring clamps and two rubber bands so what you want to do here is now grab the two loops and you can bring it over the top like that and leave it there and do the same thing on the opposite side and this is just a really quick temporary fix I want to take that and repeat the process again you can see there's a little bit of tension in here good enough to hold down this piece now what's nice about these clamps is that you can force them down a lot because you have a deeper jaw in here so that's the plus side of these collapse they're really cool really innovative and those are called bendy clamps and all I'm trying to do is utilize something I already have and even haven't abandoned clamps there have been a time or two where I needed more and not just didn't have them and this could have been an easy substitution and obviously the rubber bands not going to last forever but if you're in a pinch this is something that could probably save you and get you out of that pinch so you don't have to go crazy and try to figure out how to attach the front so next up we're gonna take on some right angle clamp jigs and I think these are going to be the most used out of all of these tips now since this is gonna set most of our right angle pieces we want to make sure that this piece of wood is as straight as possible I would also suggest going with plywood or MDF I set the miter gauge to make a 45-degree cut then I made the first pass flip the board around and then made another pass so now I have two 45 degree pieces from the ends I'm not always successful at this but I always try to go for the simplest approach for instance I use the first cut to set up a stop block at the miter saw to cut down interference on the corner and also prevent the edges from being chipped off we're going to remove all of those the right angle corner can be a bit tricky but if you set up a stop you can then hold that piece down with a push block or something to prevent the wood from flying up as you're cutting up to this point nothing has been measured I'm just taking off some material and then duplicating the same thing to the other pieces for this to be a true right angle jig I need to cut a few holes in it and I need to use a template this way I can keep the hole consistent I'm marking a location to drill out three holes because I feel like this gives me a little more flexibility I used an inch and three-eighths forcing a bit but anything in that neighborhood should work if you just starting out or you've been going at it and just don't have any of these I would totally recommend you make at least eight to twelve of these just because they're so handy if these do not hold true to a framing square or something like this I would totally say just remake them it's not worth the headache if they're off even by a little bit so I'm gonna take one of these and now let's cut it down to the workbench pass the class through and again this is what a third hole in the middle shine because it allows you to sneak under that wood and hold your piece so the beauty of these is it doesn't matter if you're trying to do a corner or you trying to do an intersection and these holes are there to be used so just use any one of them that you need to clamp and if you remember these clamps that I say I don't use much they work great for this as well the bar clamp can work on this as well but it's a little more cumbersome and all you need from this is to stay in place and allow you to have your free hands so you can then join the two boards so you may see this clip in an upcoming video but what I wanted to do here was show how you can utilize a piece of scrap wood or sacrificial fence and use that if you need to make repeatable cuts that are different lengths now I don't think it'd get much easier than this I transfer the measurements once I put them onto the temporary fence on the miter saw of course if you have a miter station then this is pretty much irrelevant but if you don't then this is a really quick and simple way to get you up and running to making quick and repeatable cuts this is a really simple attachment all I'm using is a 2 by 2 attach to the miter saw table which is secured in place using the existing holes and long enough screws through the fence if you use wood glue before then here's a common problem you may recognize when gluing multiple pieces of lumber together the minute you put a clamp on things start to shift so let's look at a couple problems and then we can introduce a solution first I'm gonna use 2x4 that has a little bit of a warp to it then we can look at plywood and see how these perform and even though I'm using 2x4 and they do have a little bit of a cup to it the slipping and shifting will still be an issue I try to with two pieces of wood and I still saw chef and I'm gonna try with three pieces and see how much more of a difference it is so you can see along the top here how they want to shift and go out of alignment and one common approach in woodworking is to sprinkle a little bit of salt on the glued parts and then that should prevent from shifting by using a salt that completely eliminated a shift I don't want to drag this out too much but I guess it's best to show this on a smooth surface to see how it reacts with plywood after gluing these up let's look at it from a different angle with wood glue in between that's gonna allow it to be extremely slippery until it's set up the real problem here is when you have perfectly cut pieces that you want to glue together but with only a clamp you'll have shifted pieces and you would then have to sand later but let's look at how this reacts when you add a little bit of salt on these two pieces so now that I have the pieces aligned together with a little salt in it I'm trying to shift it the best I can and it's not budging so this goes to show that this actually works if this is news to you the way this work is once you apply a clamping pressure to it the grain of the salt then bite into both pieces of wood which then prevent the wood from shifting I have used those in the past and they're great they allow you to join things together without seeing fasteners there are a number of ways to use dowels you can use a jig like this and there are many different jigs on the market or you can just drill a hole use a dowel Center and use that to mark and although they are great option for joining things together they're still a pain in the butt to work with and of course I like to think about you guys that are just getting started and just don't have all the tools so what happened if you don't have a dowel jig or you just misplaced it or you know exactly where it is but you're terrified of it because it lets you down the last time so I don't know if this has been done before but I'm gonna share this silly little idea to take a small nail place that in between the two areas that you're trying to join now don't be afraid you can add one nail two nails or three nails in here but Larry it takes just tape them down this way nothing move when you apply pressure and just like that Demark is now transferred to both parts and you know exactly where to drill now all you have to do is just flood the area with wood glue clamp the pieces down and you should have a solid joint there is so many tips to the trade and I wish I can keep going but unfortunately we got to bring this one to an end alright guys so if this is your first time around I don't mind sharing these tips and tricks with you and I hope you enjoy these if you guys are interested in more things like this tips tricks and cool DIY bills be sure to subscribe to this channel until next time I'm Glenn your host on DIY creators and that would catch you guys in the next one and don't forget to subscribe

Channel: DIY Creators

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Keywords: Woodworking tips & tricks for beginners, woodworking project, woodworking tips and tricks, woodworking hacks, woodworking tricks, woodworking tip, woodworking tips, woodworking tips and tricks for beginners, workshop hacks, tips and tricks, woodworking tools, How to, hack, woodworking projects, woodworking furniture projects, clamps for woodworking, table saw, woodworking class, do it yourself, diy projects

Id: 3cME3vK1aaQ

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2019