Essential Skills For Superior Accuracy in Woodworking - Tips and Tricks

[Music] I'm Jonathan cats Moses and today I want to do something a little bit different we're to depart from our regular build videos and I wanted to talk about the things that make you more accurate as a woodworker these are things that I wish I had known earlier when I first started out but they are not beginner tricks some of them are a little bit easier than others but this is how I am ultra accurate when I'm cutting and fine woodworking so I'm going to take you through several different processes I use with hand tools the table saw and drilling on the drill press or with hand drill to make very accurate cuts and holes so I'm going to go ahead and start showing you the tools I use what I use them for and we'll start with our hand tools so let me take you down to the bench here and we'll get started okay so when it comes to accuracy there's clothes and then there's really accurate William Inge who is a fabulous teacher and woodworker once said to be good joiner he's done with a pencil great joiner he's done with a marking knife and I think a marking knife is number one when it comes to accuracy I use it in every single project for every single cut that needs to be accurate they come in lots of shapes and sizes here's three of them here what I prefer is the thinner the better and so you can even use a razor blade if you don't have a marking knife a razor blade works great but this was one that I had made from a guy on Etsy that is really really thin I really like it it just doesn't quite fit anywhere in my vest so I don't use it all the time but when this is kind of my favorite marking knife the snare acts and then this is a Swiss made one that I also really like marking knifes are where it's at and pencils are good for rough dimensioning but really they're just not accurate a pencil line is thick it pushes away from your square so it's not right on your line so I don't really like to use those for anything other than rough stuff another thing that's essential in accuracy is squares I have three squares here a combination square a veritas layout square and an engineer's square an engineer's square is great because it's small you can put it up next to the blade of your tool and see if it's straight or you can hold it as a visual guide when you're drilling the combination square is obviously great it does 90 and 45 it's great for measuring marking out and also a good little trick with these is that it comes with a little scribe that's like a marking knife so if you can't find your marking that if you don't own one there is one in the bottom of your combination square another essential tool in marking out especially over long distances are marking gauges they're great there's several different styles here this is a mortising one it has two pins on one side a single pin on the other this is a wheel gauge with a micro adjust feature the pin style ones are not my favorite because if you're going along the grain it can sometimes get caught in grain and push away and not be accurate whereas a wheel gauge works both cross cuts and rip cuts very very well I also like to use dividers these are great for laying out dovetails as well as drawing circles you can also use them as sort of a pair of calipers for marking out you can just slide it along the edge creating a nice straight line but these are these are great as well when it comes to cutting of course number one is good saw technique that's that's the best and I recommend you practice that any chance you get anytime a cut doesn't matter you use a combination square in a marking knife make a perfectly straight line and practice with your hands on you'll get better over time but if you're not great at it like me then it's time to cheat using magnets and so this is the magnetic shooting board with 45 degree and 90 degrees saw guide on it that I made there's a great video there'll be a link down in the description and up in the corner here this is the cat's moses magnetic dovetail jig it has a 90 degree shoulder side I like to use that for cross cuts so let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about here and we'll get started with the handsaw okay so any good cut is going to start with marking out and you could do that a variety of ways with the tape measure or using your combination square let's say we want to take an inch and a half so what I would do is I would take my square set it to an inch and a half I would then take my marking knife and come in exactly flat against it and just hold it there it's really easy and then depending on whether you're left-handed or right-handed you would slide your square up to it do one soft line and one strong line now I didn't have my square long enough here so what's great about a marking knife line is you can find it again very easily so now I know I'm in my line I'm going to slide my square up to it and do the whole piece another great feature of using a marking knife is again you can find your line so now I know I'm right in it so I can set my square to the depth of my board slide it right up to my marking knife and now I know I'm right in that line and then I can mark it out and our line is perfectly around our board now when it comes to cutting this piece there's a lot of different ways that you can do it when you're hand sewing your cuts never gonna be perfect 90 unless you're robbed Cosman or Matt s Lea so what I like to do is when I make my cuts I'll get close to my line so one thing that I like to do is I won't cut right on my line to start what I'll do is I'll get close so I'll take my cut here and I'll get just to the left of it and I'll do a little backwards stroke to get my saw in kind of the right place I'll start sawing getting as close to my line as possible and what I do is I check the reflection to make sure my board looks straight if it looks crooked in any way your saw is not plumb to the board so then I'll start my cut making sure I stay on the way side of my line just looking down my cut and then then what I'll do is I'll look at my cut make sure see it sits off a little bit I'll put my reference edge against my shooting board here and then I'll just perfectly take it back down to my line and there we are perfectly down to our line we can check that for square it's perfectly square and that's how we have accuracy and it all starts with that marking knife line which is by far the most important part in the beginnings of accuracy let's go to the table saw I'm going to show you how I get it done they're both rip and crosscut and then we'll head over to the drill press when you're doing a crosscut on the table saw there's several ways to accurately mark it out both involve of course a knife line one is a marking gauge where you would take your marking gauge set it to a specific distance and Mark a line across but what's really important is the front face that's going to be closest to your saw blade same thing with a marking knife you would again mark a line across and then down the face let's you would first find your marking knife line slide your square up to it and then mark your line so you have two teeth and one points this way and one points this one is a alternate tooth bevel blade ATB and what you want to do is find the tooth that is going to be on the side of the line that you want to cut to so in our case it's the tooth facing on this side of the blade and we're going to bring our board right up to it with our marking line and put that tooth right up against the line so you can see here that I've got the tip of that tooth right in my marking knife line and then we know that when we cut this it's going to perfectly cut that line and so I'm going to lower the blade so you can see that so we won't cut all the way through here and I'm gonna make that cut [Music] hold our marking knife up to our line I'm going to find my line there you can see we perfectly took our line there another way to get a very accurate cut on a table saw and have it be repeatable is with a stop block this is my new universal no deflection stop block that's on sale on my website and you would do the same thing you would get right up to your blade and this time we're gonna do it with the alternate tooth because let's say we want our piece to be that long we can just line it up perfectly with our line there and then we can move our stop block right up to it now what's great about this stop block is it has a micro adjust feature so let's say we make our cut at our stop block just like that and we realize that our board is too long so what we can do is micro adjust it and so what I would do then is maybe slide a business card depending on how much is off you could use a feeler gauge I'd then hold my board in loosen the micro adjust feature you could slide it over and make your adjustment card well this is a great way to sneak up on a cut if you need it to be dead-on perfect so let me show you how we do that with rip cuts when it comes to rip cuts marking out is a lot the same you can use a marking gauge to mark a line you can use a pair of calipers which is one of my favorite tools for accuracy because you can just dial it in so let's say we wanted to cut exactly a quarter of an inch we would lock that in and then I could just drag it along the sides like a marking gauge and you get your perfect quarter inch but when you're doing a rip cut what's really important is this face the one that the saw blade is going to come in contact with the first so we're gonna make our quarter inch mark there and then the same thing when we align our teeth we're going to find the tooth that comes in contact with that area first and there we can see we're not quite adjusted it and now we can see our tooth is exactly taking that line and then using of course a push stick we would make that cut and again I'm going to lower the blade to show you that we're just hitting the line perfectly [Music] so you can see here that we just hit our line perfectly you can see it goes right there if we put our marking knife in there it lines up perfectly so let's head over to the drill press I'm going to show you how to drill holes accurately and plumb okay when it comes to being accurate while drilling there's several tricks but what is most important is using some sort of device to make a divot exactly where you want to drill now this is a scratch awl and uses manpower to make a divot and this is a center punch which uses a spring-loaded punch to make a divot so you would just press it down it makes a hole or with this one you would just press it yourself I tend to use the automatic Center punches because they make a much bigger divot which allows you to drill bit to find where you need to drill so what I like to do is when I'm drilling at the drill press I'll use my calipers and usually let's say I think most times when I drilling I'm drilling in the center of something so what I would do is measure a piece and here we have let's call it one point four six for easy division so that's point seven three is the middle so I'd get two point seven three lock it in and then I would just drag my calipers over where I want to do it and I'd do it from both sides in case I'm slightly off you'll find that when you go from both sides then I locate where I want to drill I take my Center punch and because you did that line with your calipers it's really easy to find it just like a marking knife on and I would punch down maybe even a couple times to leave a divot or you could do it with your scratch awl you just find your hole press down and what that allows is your drill press to or your drill bit to find the hole there's several types of drill bits obviously there's Brad point bit there's I don't really know the name of these cone bits it just has an angled face and then there's Forstner bits here which have a point and so let me show you how I get accurate holes using all of these so with a drill press what I like to do is if I'm drilling a singular hole I'll start with the drill press off and I'll find my hole and then I'll let go of the board and just kind of go up and down just a little bit and now make sure I'm dead center and then I'll hold firmly and start to drill and then I know I'm right in my hole now let's say I was running and I'm gonna move it slightly so you can see right when I get to I'm gonna loosen my grip a little bit and the drill bit is gonna realign it and go right to that divot wherever that may be I'm gonna go over here little loosen my grip and it lines it then I hold it real tight and start the drill with a regular hand drill and you want to make you almost always want to do a 90 degree hole what I like to do is I'll take the engineer's Square that we talked about earlier and I'll lay it on my piece of wood so we'll start just in our divot I'll put my drill bit right in and I can find it while it's off and then I'll use my square to make sure I'm visually looking that I'm nice and square and I'll drill down and so that's how I drill accurate holes using either drill press or hand drill so those are my tips and tricks that I find helped me be a lot more accurate in my woodworking but I'd love to hear what you do so please down in the comments tell me your tricks and they'll include them in the next video thank you so much for watching you guys please click the smash button comment do all that good stuff everything is read and appreciated and and thank you so much for your support have a wonderful day stay safe in the shop and I'll see you soon

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 221,403

Rating: 4.8887 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, custom, diy, dovetail, jig, magnetic, woodworking skills, woodworking for all, accuracy, cut accurately, skills, accuracy and precision, tricks, tips, woodworking tools, best woodworking tools, best hand tools, woodworking tips and tricks, woodworking tips and techniques, 2018, 101 woodworking tips and tricks, fine woodworking, hand tool projects and tips for the beginner woodworking, tips and tricks in woodworking, saw accuractely, table saw accuracy, tablesaw

Id: goUc74RQRus

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/thrazznos]

I freaked out when you put your arm on the tablesaw sled while the blade was still moving at 8:30!

[u/PhragMunkee]

Accuracy is good, but repeatability may be better, at least if you need to make the same cut more than once. Stop blocks and fences definitely make up for my inaccuracy! Now I’m gonna go check out your fancy stop block.

[u/BearIsTheBest]

Love your vids and about to try to build that Moxon Vice.

[u/Clevelandhitch]

Good stuff. As a beginner with little time to acquire knowledge it’s great of you to quickly review solid techniques. Thanks for sharing.

[u/jkatzmoses]

I would love to hear your tip and tricks for better accuracy. Cheers!