Make Professional Push Sticks for Workshop Safety

hi and welcome to next level carpentry you know if you've given much thought to the fact that any part of you that touches a spinning saw blade you ain't getting back then you might be curious about how and why I designed my favorite push stick and in a video that shows how I make them I'll show you how easy it is to make a routing template to make push sticks in a variety of configurations like these guys so if that sounds interesting you push stick I mean just stick around and I'll show you what I'm talking about [Music] here's something to keep in mind push sticks are expendable the fingers aren't so it's a good idea to make sure you always have a push stick available when you're working with power tools even with something as amazing as blades stopping technology push sticks are vital to jobsite and workshop safety and I'll point out that I'm only going to talk about shop-made push sticks in this video I can't count the number of patented better mousetrap versions available on the market and I'm sure many of them have a dedicated following of woodworkers who use them so anyone who has a favorite I'm not going to try to talk you out of it and you'll hear me mention personal preference a lot of times in this video I will say though that even if you already have a favorite push stick that do you use you'll find the templating method that I show in this video useful for other woodworking applications so it should be worth your while to stick around as I'm sure you know there's a lot of videos out there on YouTube showing how to make and use push sticks in my opinion the designs range all the way from ridiculous to respectable so I thought I'd enter the fray with this video to explain why mine look like this and then show you how I make them for starters I want to talk about ergonomics there's basically two types of push sticks I call them sticks and handles this flimsy plastic toy that came with my Dewalt portable table saw is a stick it's skinny and long I guess to keep my hand away from the blade but I'm doing that look how old my hand in my forearm our position in a forceful kickback situation the board gets driven backwards like a mule kick with the force going into my wrist not a picture I'm comfortable with when the work piece becomes a projectile I'm not going to be able to stop it you make matters worse my effort to stop it is going to carry my hand towards the blade no thanks this is a poor design in my opinion in any videos that show how to make end or use these scare me and I'm fearless hmm noisy garbage can so that's why I choose the handle style of a push stick my wrist is in a solid position and any kickback force goes right into my torso where I can push hard enough to stop the blade if necessary telling get the saw shut off in any event where there's a mishap the force in my hand is going forward past the blade instead of over and down into it here again there's a lot of handle style push sticks out there on YouTube and while they're organ Amish are adequate I think that in general their design style and usability are lacking some of them are made out of framing lumber but I don't want a big clunky chunk of to buy material with a handle hole cut in it and a heel that's made of the long grain lumber that can split off it seems to me that they're too big bulky and uncomfortable to be practical and I don't want a piece of plywood that's good for ergonomics and proportions for so ragged that I get splinters from it a smaller peeve I have is the difference between a handle that's cut out as an elongated hole rather than an open-ended style like this I prefer the open-ended style because it's a little less bulky and easier for me to use but I'm not gonna argue with anyone that thinks the elongated hole style is better so with all those parameters in mind I developed this style and design and with the templating method that I'll show you how about that I can make a couple dozen of these in less time than it takes for a trip to the ER and with the wide range of pieces operations and procedures that I encounter on a daily basis while working in the shop it really makes sense that more than one style is beneficial so as an added bonus I'll cover a few simple tricks for making variations of this design in two configurations like these that I haven't seen anywhere else on YouTube with all that covered I'll show you the process I use for making these routing templates about a quarter inch melamine let's get started my favorite material for templating is MDF it's easy to cut it's easy to shape but when the templates done it leaves a very dense durable surface that doesn't splinter or chip and it'll withstand a lot of use from the bearing on a flush trim router bit my favourite MDF material is the kind with melamine faces on it the melamine face makes it easy to mark on makes it easy to erase and it's just durable over all four templates I still have a pattern from the last time I made a batch of these push sticks but I'll start the process from scratch so that you can see some of the tricks that make creating a shape like this quick easy and efficient the absence of an accident does not mean the presence of safety and pause thought that was a wise observation but the presence of a push stick definitely goes a long way towards the presence of safety for the record I'm not telling anybody how to make her use a push stick but I will show the steps I use when I make a batch of my favorite push sticks the final shape and contour of a push stick is always going to be someone's personal preference but this is the contour I've developed over time that works great for me so I'm going to replicate most of the proportions of this on this new pattern a heel depth of two and a half inches works out nicely this push sticks of ten and a quarter inches long that's probably how big of a piece of scrap I had when I made that one but I'm going to lengthen it to 11 inches the height of this heel let's call that two and a quarter the notch in the heel is 3/8 a overall height is six inches [Music] back of this piece of the quarterings from the end and it's four inches up from the bottom I like to use things from around the shop and have a nice smooth radius it's easier than using a compass so it looks like we're going with starting fluid for the heel it's moving for the nose so let's go with rocky's I'm gonna aim for a thickness of about inch and five-eighths you just start out with this curve and blend it in the back of the handles a smaller diameter and I like to use sockets for drawing circles on patterns because they're nice and smooth and they come in a closed variety of ranges and just draw the whole circle as I explained earlier I like the angle of this handle to give good pressure on the push stick but not leave my hand diving towards the blade if there's a wreck and it looks like this angle that I've used in the past it's about 20 degrees I'm gonna just shoot a 20 degree line in here to represent that if I go about three and three quarters to the front of that handle cut out it's going to work pretty good when I carry the same diameter through with a high point which is going to be three inches from the back there's a radius there and a radius there to match up kind of putting the shape together here I'll start to blend the pieces together and just use the same radius again there have a tangent point at the bottom of that circle that'll make a nice transition put a nice little swoop in there that's where that MDF is just really nice allows you to modify and fear the curves with a pencil come up with a decent shape I like this a little better going to take a little meat out of there and I don't want this handle to get thinner than the socket just put another guideline there but basically at this point need to fare these two curves together you're going to adapt this model a little closer to keep this area of the push stick a little thinner it's all personal preference put a nice smoking taper on the front of that push stick some people will be faster at this some will be slower but the beauty of it is you only cost this little bit of time and a little bit of pencil led for refining the design and so dial in the design it can just adjust anything and I want to kind of make it my own I was channeling Bob Ross here I'd say I'm gonna put a curve just so but you're making a push stick for you so you make it just the way you like it because I make my push sticks out of plywood I don't have to worry about the grain being fragile anywhere and snapping off the heel or the handle and use that's pretty close to the original but I like to contour this just a little better than my last batch plus it helps you to see how the geometry of the design can be maintained while the actual shape is a little bit different one drawback of using a socket to those curves is that they don't leave a Center Point and I want a concentric Center point in the handle so I can drill this hole for hanging these up so I'll just have to by guessing by golly up with a compass that shouldn't take too long but acetone on a rag [Music] [Applause] put that circle in there and reconnect these tangent arcs to finish up the layout and I want a good mark there so use a center punch so I don't lose it and I think I'm gonna go with that the next thing I'll do with this template is to make the straight cuts for the heal for the bottom of the push stick and for the end I'm just going to cut this end off on the miter box a cool trick for making this template really accurate and quickly is to use a table saw to make the straight bottom cut on the push stick so I'll set the far side of the blade at the 3/8 of an inch I'm after by lining the blade up with the pencil mark if I leave the blade set low it's just going to put a long tangent cut in there so I'm going to raise the blade abnormally high to get a nice clean cut very close back to that heel so when I'm actually making these push sticks the router now has a perfect straight edge to follow for that portion of the pattern this little heel I can cut out with another cut and the routers guide bearing won't really get back into that corner anyways but it doesn't mean I can't do a neat job on the pattern the contour of the pattern and the rough contour of all the push sticks can be cut out on a scroll saw or with the jigsaw and I get this bandsaw sitting in the corner over here and it'll feel neglected if I don't use it for this project and I'm a little bit spoiled so I'm going with the Laguna even if it means spending ten minutes to swap out the blade from the inch and a quarter that's in there to a quarter inch for making the tight contours on the push sticks however throw in a quick little bonus tip here and show you how to call a bandsaw blade this one's 150 inches by inch and a quarter from that 16 inch bandsaw and they can be a little bit crazy to deal with but to call them up into a manageable size I just carefully set the blade on the floor and step on it I'm not grinding it on the concrete that dulled the teeth and then I turned my hand backwards and grabbed the blade and I push down and twist as I'm driving it down and the blade folds up into a manageable but still kind of dangerous coil and if you take that tip and a five-dollar bill to Starbucks they'll give you a cup of coffee I'll upload a photograph of this push stick pattern drawn with these one-inch grid squares to Pintrest so if anybody's interested in the design or the layout they can just go to Pinterest search for next level carpentry and you should find that image uploaded there some viewers will recall the video I did about cleaning and maintaining cast iron surfaces on equipment where I shined up this bandsaw table but I'll include a link at the end of this video showing how to get a table nice and clean and smooth like this for anybody who hasn't seen the video already it's times like this that that nice clean smooth surface really helps for cutting a complex curve like this because the piece slides around effortlessly allowing me to follow this line nice and close the final edit of the line on the pattern has nice smooth curves to it the general line and shape of this push stick is very much like I want it there's one final step after cutting it out on the band well smooth it up till it feels as smooth as it looks so when I'm cutting it out I want to leave the slightest bit of extra material on the outside of that line so that I can sand it to that contour if I cut through the line I've got to change more of the contour and I might not be as satisfied with the final result so what you're seeing as I'm making this cut in my effort to leave the line the tightness of some of the radiuses mean that I've got to go with this really narrow bandsaw blade I could get this pretty close with a half-inch blade by making multiple cuts but because I've got to cut out the pattern and then the blanks for a whole batch of push sticks it was worth switching out to this quarter inch blade to make this cut nice and accurate because it's safe sanding and everybody knows that I hate sanding if you haven't seen the advantage yet of using a template method for making these push sticks I'm sure you will by the end of the video but I think one of the things that makes these next-level push sticks superior is the fact that they're smooth to the touch they've got a nice contour they're comfortable to use they're a nice shape and a style and having that nice shape and smooth finish makes it something that I want to use not that I have to use the next step I'll do is to fear these curves with the sandpaper so to get all the curves on this template nice and smooth so they're worth following on all the push sticks I've got a few tools in an arsenal here to work with basically some 80 grit sandpaper a sanding block it's a 36 grit sandpaper and then these PVC sanding blocks that kind of fit close to some of the curves on here so I've got three different sizes and I'll usually start out with 36 grit sandpaper to knock the big nibs down and to make these pieces of PVC pipe work really great as sanding blocks I just cut a slit in them with a hacksaw by just removing a thin curve from that hacksaw blade the tension in the pipe Springs itself back to close that gap but I can expand it with a screwdriver and slip a piece of sandpaper in and then it holds the curve nicely as I do the work another little bonus tip for you there and this sharing process is trickier to do on camera because I've got to keep my shoulders out of the way of the view basically I'm just sanding these curves to get them close to that line and make a nice smooth contour use the big round one for that large curve I use this flat block for the outside curves I'm careful to keep the sanding block and square to the surfaces as I can so that the edge of the pattern doesn't lean that throws off the final result you can see how quick and obedient that MDF is for this sort of thing just a few quick flicks with that sanding block takes the bandsaw ribs out of there and a heartbeat doesn't take much at all to get this straight enough if you've done a good job with sawing out the template and like I said the hardest part of doing this particular one is not standing in front of a camera once I've got all the heavy blade marks out I'll switch to 80 grit sandpaper and I'm not gonna bother clipping it into these tubes because they're so little to do and just go around the template with this 80 grit paper the main reason for that is to make it smooth enough so that I can feel if there's any ribs or bumps in it when it's done the bearing on the router bit won't really pick up the deeper scratches I just want the pattern to be smooth so I can feel if the curves are all nice and fair meaning no jumpy transitions between one curve to the other I can make curves without jumpy transitions between them but video clips that's another matter and I kind of eyeball those curves to see if they flow smoothly between each other and I've made hundreds of patterns and random shapes with this process so this goes pretty quick for me it slowed down by the video of course but I want to encourage viewers to give this a shot if you're not comfortable with the process just cut proud of your lines and you'll see just how fast you can get a really fantastic pattern out of this process once I like the look and feel of the curves I take some fine sandpaper and just knock down that little melamine burr around the edges and then I throw it on the floor just to see if it's any good all the time invested in making a nice-looking accurate smooth pattern starts to pay off right about now and this scrap of Russian birch plywood with all these layers is the perfect thing so I'll lay out a batch of push sticks to cut out of this piece because it's plywood it doesn't really matter which way the veneer goes they can go either way but I prefer to have the grain running the long way it just makes it a little bit nicer in the end I can clean up this scrap of plywood a little bit with the big mistakes eraser if you need one of those go to the amazon influencers page for next level carpentry there's a link at the bottom of the video and you can get one of these bruisers with a cleaned up panel I can just proceed to layout push sticks on it this is a lot like punching out cookies on cookie dough just make them fit wherever they go to maximize yield from the panel front and back doesn't matter I don't want that screw hole to end up in a push stick so I'm going to go around it like so and I leave enough space in between these push stick shaped cookies so that I can get a bandsaw blade through here you do the same thing for cutting them out with the jigsaw and I'll put in a plug here for these papermate sharp writer mechanical pencils because they have a twist out lead and not a clicky lid so I can advance the lead and to continue to draw a sharp line but not so much that it snaps off if I flinch no surprise there's a link to those pencils on the next level carpentry Amazon influencers page as well and I always figure as long as I'm at it I might as well make up a good batch of these things because the set-up time justifies it you don't have Russian birch plywood scraps laying around the shop other veneered plywood works this is some maple / birch plywood it's got fewer plies but it still makes for a very nice finished product on the push stick another option is to visit the dumpster of a local woodworker or cabinet shop because piece is big enough to make push sticks aren't big enough for much else so they can easily end up tossing enough scrap pieces in a dumpster for a five-year supply a push sticks and I'm really happy with the yield I'm getting from this particular scrap two four six eight of them nice and now it's back to the bandsaw to rough cut all these pieces out and my rough cut I mean just separating chunks with individual push sticks on and then I'll go around each piece individually to trim it close to the line and if you haven't seen this template method yet take my word for it because you'll see by the time the process is done why this set of steps work so well but as I'm making the final bandsaw cut next to the pattern my goal is to leave between 1/16 and an eighth of an inch of extra material on the outside of the line and that'll get trimmed off with the router and a template fire and a hole once the pieces I left out I'll take a careful pass around to leave the margin that gets trimmed off with a router by the third blank I'm kind of hitting my stride with the bandsaw because I've learned to run these tight corners a little proud in the margin on this particular cutout as well within range of using the template system this is about as much extra as I want to go and that's about as tight as I want to get on any other cutouts but for the rest of the push sticks from here on out it's rinse leather repeat fact of the matter is I could just stop right there but these push sticks and be way ahead of the game but hey this is next-level carpentry so I'm going to go through the rest of the steps take these push sticks to the next level so we'll take these rough sawn blanks back to the bench and with the teeny drill bit drill a hole in the center mark of the circle on the end of the handle and use that hole to guide a nail through that will hold the template to each of the blanks I'll place two more nails somewhat randomly to hold it secure during the routing process and at this stage I don't need to worry about the lines that were drawn on the blanks before cutting so if I got too close to one of the lines on one edge I can just shift the pattern over to the other side the goal is to keep an even margin of extra material sticking out all the way around the template drive a little nails line this one's strategically placed so that when the routing is done I can use it as the center point on a Brad point bit to drill that hole through the handle for hanging these up the key to the speed and efficiency of this entire process is having a good flush trim router bit this is a three flute cutter that has a cutting length of one inch so the with the bearing writing on the template those cutters will trim the plywood blank perfectly flush to the pattern all the way around I think I've said before in videos that I really prefer the flush trim router bits rather than a straight cutting bit with a guide bushing in the router this is a one-to-one relationship there's no intermediate bushing to throw things off and have to plan for the patterns exact size of the finished product and one pass around makes the to match up perfectly and besides that sanding is taken almost completely out of the equation with only a light pass once the routing is all done and you can't beat that and template routing for small pieces is one of the few times that I actually use a router table but I just can't be beat for speed and safety in this sort of application whenever possible I use a D handled router and go handheld if I was just doing one of these pieces that's probably what I would use here but being is doing a whole batch a router and a table is by far the better method I don't have one of those fancy jetsam router table lifts I'll just use the good old hand crank for setting the depth of the router bit to trim this off then setting this up so the flutes on the cutter are about 1/16 above the workpiece that leaves plenty of template surface for the bearing to ride on if the bits too low it leaves a flange of wood around here and a lot of smoke during the operation if the bits too high up the router bearing tends to ride on the corner of the template it'll wear it down sooner and it would follow any little chips in the edge right in the middle is the sweet spot and I'm not gonna brag to anybody about my router table set up like I said I don't use it a real lot it's more than adequate for this sort of thing but I was constantly doing router work I would probably invest in one of those hotshot just some tables or something if you're watching close you'll notice that the final contour of my favorite push sticks is a thumbnail profile but this step in the process merely shapes the workpiece to the exact shape of the template the some nail is a separate process that we'll do next I really like a good set of ear plugs and a freshly laundered pair of Smurf gloves at this stage of the game ear plugs help protect my selective hearing and the freshly laundered smooth gloves are plenty tacky for safely handling this piece during the routing process for anyone who doesn't have much experience using flush trim bit in a router table start out with a bigger workpiece and get used to the way the bit wants to move the workpiece you'll notice that I start in and then go off the edges of the corners rather than trying to get right into that that'll cause the piece to jump and kind of defeat the purpose of making a safety push stick by chewing up your fingers so make sure you're comfortable with using your router in this application so that you can have a smooth and clean result without danger of making your finger while trying to be safe back at the bench I just use a putty knife to slip in between the pattern and the workpiece give it a twist to pop out those nails this one falls out but the other two I just drive them backwards slip that one back into place and it's remarkable how perfectly that works with so little effort and now that you're familiar with the steps for getting to this stage again it's rinse lather repeat and until all the pieces in this stack look like the piece in that stack and just keep in mind that router bits your friend when it comes to workpiece but not your friend when it comes to fingers and it just soon take the end off your fingers cut that wood so be careful it comfortable what you're doing and work safely well after about 15 minutes of you're splitting sawdust making effort all the rough planks are routed smooth and what do you think of them apples well I guess I'm just into bonus tips for this video so here's another one for you doing all this routing on that dry wood can put a coating of dust on your glasses or safety glasses pretty quickly making it hard to see so when I get in that situation I reach for my all dryer sheets pull one of these little gems out and give your lenses a quick wipe with them and something about the magic of these all dryer sheets for sensitive skin will keep the dust from sticking to your lenses for quite a while I just keep the use sheet in the drawer of the bench and can use it a dozen times or so before I got a dig into the box for another one there you have a Procter & Gamble in the work show I think these push sticks are coming out great so I want to pause here for a few minutes and talk about other design configuration options that I like to have on hand for push sticks everything we've talked about so far has revolved around the standard push stick handle design but I want to talk about some other design configuration options that I find real handy to have for special case scenarios in the shop since they spent all the time making a good pattern might as well make use of that and one of the quickest ways to adapt this pattern to another configuration is to just lay out the pattern on a piece of quarter-inch melamine and make a few push sticks that are just a quarter inch thick I'm not afraid to sacrifice a regular push stick when I have to cut something less than 3/4 of an inch but sometimes I'll just use one of these quarter inch ones to push a small strip through the saw because it's clean handy these are so easy to make another configuration option that's pretty closely related to this is one with a tall heel on it I use this for thick work pieces sometimes I've had times when I was pushing a stack of rips through and it was nice to be able to push them all at once with this thicker model that was kind of for a specific instance but it was easy to make by using the same pattern on a piece of plywood and then just cutting these three straight heel cuts on the table saw before routing out the shape of the handle so that's helpful once in a while another thing I'll mention is when the standard push sticks get pretty chewed up which is their whole purpose in life and rather than throw them right in the woodbox I'll run them over to joiner to plane off all the saw cups on the bottom of it till I have just a smooth straight flat edge and then I can recycle a push stick by gluing it and screwing it to another piece of material this is a push stick I used in the triangle trellis video for one of the compound miter sleds it's just a recycled push stick screwed to a piece of quarter-inch melamine and that was in turn screwed down to the fixture I've done the same thing with one of the recycled handles and put it on a piece of three-quarter inch material instead and then that works real handy for pushing resaw pieces through the bandsaw I can make at all three quarter-inch fence and get a lot of pushing pressure when I'm doing a deep tall resaw that takes a lot of pressure and then I don't have to worry about my fingers and the blade when the cut comes to the end another configuration I do is this one and I've planed down the heel so that it's only 1/8 of an inch thick that works real nice for pushing thin materials through the saw this is typically what I use when I'm pushing quarter-inch material through because the thicker push stick it doesn't catches the piece but it doesn't lay on it so by having a real short heel I can still get plenty of pushing pressure but it's more positive and there's three other push stick styles that are more of an evolutionary design change than a linear one and those are these three over here this one is just a handle forward version the push stick is over twice as long the handles forward so I can put pressure kind of on a different part of a workpiece I use this on a jointer a fair amount and then there's this one that's basically the same push sticks just with an extended nose sometimes that helps to control a piece a little better and less but not least is this guy with the two handles if I really got to get after some and push real hard and truth be told I don't use this one very much at all but it's fun to make and it's cool to have around the shop and it inspires thinking for other configurations that might be worthwhile for a specific project you might be working on but right now I'll just go through the process I use for making these other configurations and I'll use this handle forward model as an example how to leverage the investment of time in the standard push stick pattern to create these other configurations and it's no surprise that I'm starting with scrap a quarter inch melamine and to make the handle forward design I'll just trace out the heel of the standard push stick on this piece of melamine and carry this heel notch all the way through and slide two handle forward about eight inches which is similar to the one I made and used before and then by holding the heel at the bottom of the piece and the nose along that parallel line like so I'll trace out this push stick but I don't need the complete handle or the complete nose on it and then finally I'll just slide this forward to the length that I want the push stick with those segments drawn out I just trace a line to connect the two so that they'll blend together now cut this all like before on the table saw and the bandsaw and you'll notice the only places I cut close to the line are the two areas where I'll have to freehand a template the rest of these sections I'm going to leverage the original pattern and route those profiles and I used the same holes with shorter nails to attach the original template to the new and then I use a Bosch cult router with the teeny flush trim bit to true the patterns to each other and then all's I need to do is do the slight work on the transition between those curved segments with the 80 grit and 36 grit sandpaper when I clean up the edges and I have an extended push stick that evolved from the standard prescription and I won't insult you by going through the steps I use forgetting from this pattern to the roughed out blank but it probably should give us the floor test yep it's a good one it survived and after a trip to the bandsaw and the router table this forward handle push stick has caught up to everybody else and I really think it's worth the extra step of making a pattern even if it's for just one push stick because in my thinking it's so much easier to sand a couple little spots on the pattern and route the shape and it is to route the shapes on the plywood and half the sand these plywood areas afterwards but maybe that's just what they say the lazy man works the artist right and I don't want to kid myself here because I'm well aware of that all the pattern making and routing that I've shown so far in this video is exactly the sort of work that CNC machines excel at so if you have access to a CNC or have a friend named Brent Greene don't waste your time with all the fussing that I'm doing making templates and routing out these push sticks because it can be done digitally with CNC technology and way less time with a lot less effort but the rest of the steps that I'll show to finish up these push sticks is more along the lines of what homo sapiens are adept at so I kind of think of it as job security now that I've done profile routing all of the push stick blanks the next thing to do is to put the thumbnail edge on the curved profile and I prefer a thumbnail profile rather than a full half round and that's just personal preference once again to get a nice thumbnail edge I'm using a 3/8 inch roundover bit and if I was to run the full profile of the bit it would give that a half round so I'm running this so that the cutter is running just a little shy of the center mark of the 3/4 inch piece probably won't make much sense until you actually give this a try but it's important that the bearing be running as close to the cutter as possible so if there's one of those little washers on the router bit I take it off so that the bearing runs closer to the carbide cutter and so I've got the bit all set up in the table router I'll run a test of the thumbnail on a scrap to make sure I'm not going to end up with a big flat spot on the thumbnail or end up with a full half round I just sneak up on it a little edit on the first setting was a little bit shallow left more of a flat spot in the middle than I like if I go up any more than this I'll just end up with a half around I like what I'm seeing there so it's time to route all the blanks [Music] that's pretty much all there is to it for getting a nice comfortable grip aful surface that smooth and make sure a very usable push stick for squaring up the heel notch first I make a rip three eighths of an inch thick conveniently using one of those handy quarter-inch thick push sticks and that small rip will hold the push sticks level and I set the blade at 3/8 of an inch and the fence at two and a half and make sure all the pieces are square to the fence and clamp them together [Music] and a few passes are all it takes to square up that heel wonderfully next I shut up a 5/16 Brad point bit in the drill press zero it out on the auxilary table and then using the center point from nailing the template on as a guide for the hole in the handle and then chase it with a countersink bit for a nice finished hole for hanging these up to keep them handy I keep a whole assortment of push sticks nearby and I even welded a special peg on this portable table saw stand for the hanging push sticks that I can live with here's another place where the template routing method really pays off all the homework you put into making a good template that produces consistent smooth duplicates of the push stick there's very little sanding involved and with this batch of push sticks all's I got to do is fire up this murca Darrell's random orbit sander I've nicknamed him Colonel sander give these a quick lick on the faces and then with a used disk go over these routed thumbnail edges and they're all slicked up and ready for a coat of water-based varnish no no about you but I'd sure rather spend more time making templates and less time sandy I also appreciate being able to do things in batches from making the template to making the pieces you get out the tool once and you can do eight repetitions for very little more time and effort and I've set these pieces up like this on the bench and give them all a quick shot of a water-based varnish without a whole lot more effort than getting a brush and doing just one after sanding the first coat of varnish on all these adding stickers and then spraying on with the second quart this batch of push sticks is done and it should leave little doubt where I stand on push stick design and how I go about making them so I want to make a couple comments and wrapping up this video and the first one is that a push stick in hand keeps fingers on hand and to keep that thought in front of mine whenever I'm out here working in the shop I put these stickers on them to always remind me [Music] the second thing I'll say is that friends don't let friends work without push sticks so when you're making a batch of these make some extras and give them to other woodworkers that you know because you can take my word for it when it comes to finger protection you don't want to come up short and from next-level carpentry thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Next Level Carpentry

Views: 273,483

Rating: 4.8928275 out of 5

Keywords: safety, push, stick, tablesaw, block, workshop, protection, pushstick, rip, fence, blade, sawstop, kickback, kick, back, favorite, professional, carpenter, cabinet, DIY, accident, prevention, teeth, handle, carpentry, dewalt, de walt, biesmeyer, rockler, delta, bosch, matt jackson, next level carpentry, bandsaw, coil, big mistake, pattern, template, router, jessem, woodwork, heisz, jay bates, ibuilditca, best ever, profssional, master carpenter

Id: 8h4OJHhSH8A

Length: 41min 50sec (2510 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018