Perfect Miters and 3 Other Tips Every Woodworker Should Know

hello and welcome back to tips and tricks that every woodworker should know the show where you send us your tips and tricks and we talk about show and explain them in today's episode we're going to cover tips that'll help you improve your miter joints clamp weird angles reduce tear out and save time and get better results when sanding thanks to everybody who's submitted tips so far and if you want to submit one of your own all the information is in the description all right sean let's hear the first tip all right this first tip comes in from hedyobnash and is all about getting perfect looking mitered corners on boxes and cabinets i remember as a newer woodworker one of the techniques i found to be the trickiest to get just right were boxes with mitered corners especially if i wanted to do something that had a grain match or a waterfall edge and one of the issues that i ran into the most were my miter joints being a tiny bit open on that outside corner which is really the most important spot from an aesthetic standpoint there are plenty of reasons why this might happen but a common factor is that when we attempt to set our blade to exactly 45 degrees we miss it by just a fraction of a degree the problem is that when this happens because each joint has two bevel cuts that small error is doubled which can create that gap i was talking about a second ago so to combat this we can use a very simple trick and that is instead of attempting to set your blade to exactly 45 degrees intentionally set it to just past that like barely passed if you're using a small speed square you can set the blade so that there's just a tiny gap near the bottom just enough to see some light or if you're using one of these digital angle gauges you can set it right as it ticks past 45 and what this does is guarantee that we will cut the bevel just a hair past 45 and that will result in our miter joints being closed at the top of the corner instead of the bottom when gluing up the entire box and as you can see because the blade was set just ever so slightly past 45 degrees the entire joint still looks really good a lot of times in woodworking i say shoot for perfect and there's usually a margin of error that we can work within if you slightly miss but with something like miter joints we only really want to miss one way so this trick is kind of hedging our bets and making sure we miss to the side that will give us the better looking result and honestly because these outer corners are being pushed together more so than if we had cut the bevels at a perfect 45 we can argue that this will give us the best looking result out of everything we'll put a couple links to projects where we've used this technique to get perfect looking miners in the description so go check those out all right chris you have a tip for us thanks sean this next one comes into us from anomalous cyric and it's all about clamping weird angles anytime you're faced with clamping something other than a perfectly right angle things can get a little tricky even clamping 45 degree bevels on a 90 degree box can be hard but things can get even more difficult when you're faced with something like this or this so the first tip which isn't really a tip would be use some kind of clamping jig something like these clamping blocks can be really useful we only have seven of them and i don't think you can buy these specifically anymore so we even made one out of plywood so if you want to make some here's a quick little cheat sheet and we'll also put a link in the description to some similar clamps that you can buy and while these work pretty well there are other solutions so let's quickly cover a couple so take something like this back leg sub assembly for the long view chair that we built here you'd be trying to clamp an extremely obtuse angle which is probably the hardest situation so when it's possible the best solution is planning ahead here i knew that this would be the case so prior to cutting out my shapes while i still had oversized work pieces i could draw out the eventual shape on my work piece to see approximately where i'd need to create clamping pressure then based on that line i could clear out a couple of notches drill in a few dowels and glue and clamp the whole thing together now this was a scenario where i happened to have a lot of extra material on my workpiece so doing this was possible but that's not always the case and that leads me to my favorite or anomalous favorite clamping weird angle trick take for example something like the pico console which we also have plans for anyway so if you look at the leg assembly at the bottom we've got a couple of 40 degree angles that combine to make an 80 degree angle and then at the top we've got another 40 and a 60 degree angle that'll make a 100 degree angle so if you had them you could use clamping blocks to tackle a job like this but one of the downsides is like you can see in this shot you can pretty quickly burn through a lot of clamps going with this route here for this single leg you would need to use a minimum of six clamps and four clamping blocks but what if i told you you could tackle this entire glue up with just two clamps and no clamping blocks because you can sort of you're still going to need clamping blocks the trick is you've already made them you just don't know it yet so in order to make the three pieces that would become the leg you'd have to cut these four joint faces and as a byproduct of cutting these joint faces you'd be left with these four off cut pieces well by reorienting them like you see in this color-coded animation you can see that you've unintentionally created custom clamping blocks with perfectly complementary angles for optimized clamping pressure so to tackle the job of assembling you could opt for six clamps again like you see in this shot or you could just glue on your offcuts and use only two clamps just keep in mind that you're going to need to remove and clean up the edges where you placed your clamping blocks down the road if you do glue them on all right shawn you got another one for us oh oh phew thanks i do have another tip and this one is all about eliminating tear out by not really eliminating tear out i know that kind of sounds like nonsense so let me explain we've all dealt with tara when making cuts and more specifically when making cross cuts or cuts that are perpendicular to the grain in a piece of wood and there are plenty of great ways to help combat tear out before it happens maybe we'll get into some of those in another video but for this one it's all about the order in which we do things so that any tear out from a cross cut will ultimately get removed when a part is cut to final dimension with a rip cut since that cut is happening parallel to the grain direction so in the simplest terms the idea is to cross cut then rip whenever possible one of the main places that i use this technique is when making drawer boxes and drawer fronts when making a drawer box or a drawer front i first cut all of my sides to length by cross cutting and i also cut rabbets at each corner of the drawer box to join all the sides together when i do all of this there's plenty of opportunity to get tear out because most of these cuts happen perpendicular to the grain direction so what i always do is make sure all of my drawer parts are left wide before i cut all of them to length and cut in all of the joinery in case i get some tear out like you can see here then the last thing i do is rip everything to width often by taking a cut on both edges of each part and this will remove any tear out that was left during the initial cross cuts and at the same time get all of my parts to final width when used in the right situation this is a great technique that doesn't take any extra time or extra tools and materials and will leave you with tear out free parts and who doesn't love that alright chris you have another one for us well another tip but before we get to that first let's take a minute to thank this video's sponsor squarespace so i've been using squarespace for over five years now and it's been great prior to that i used to code everything by hand which is fine if you like doing that but honestly the outcome wasn't as good as it is now with the templates that i use with squarespace so in addition to squarespace making it super easy to build and maintain your site by domains and all that stuff they also have plenty of e-commerce which has been really helpful since we started selling online woodworking courses things like inventory management a simple and secure checkout process and unlimited products allows us to easily manage online transactions so if you're thinking about starting a website or even if you already have one that you think could be better go to yourself to check out squarespace to see if it might be a better option for you just head over to squarespace.com4i's to start your free trial and then when you're ready to launch use the offer code 4is to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain all right thanks squarespace all right this next one's kind of tip adjacent but it's something that could potentially save you from ruining a piece so it's worth sharing so i'm sure batch sanding pieces is something that we've all done probably the place it happens most frequently is when you're sanding the edges of identical parts say something like these chair legs or maybe something like this slotted coffee table that i built a couple weeks ago the basic idea is you clamp your pieces together and this saves you time and ensures that your shapes stay more identical than they would if you were to try sanding them one by one but another time where batch sanding can be really helpful is when you're sanding the faces of identical pieces so going back to the chair example sanding the faces of certain areas particularly these can get really tricky because there's such a little area for you to place your sander so that means not only will your sander sand much more aggressively in these areas but you're also going to be more prone to tipping or rocking your sander and basically messing up your shapes so what i'll often do is batch pieces together like this so that i can sand multiple faces at the same time this makes it way easier to stop your sander from tipping and it also distributes the pressure of your sander over more surface which just leads the better results all right as i said not really a hardcore tip per se but it can definitely save you from some potential heartache okay if you want to check out more woodworking tips and tricks we'll have links to our other videos in the description and if you want to submit a tip of your own there will be information there as well all right have a great day

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 736,783

Keywords: woodworking, wood working, wood work, woodwork, wood, woodworking tips, woodworking tricks, woodworking tips and tricks, carpentry tips, DIY woodworking, workshop tips and tricks, woodworking hacks, woodworking hack, woodworking tip, perfect miters, miter joint, clamping tips, clamping tricks, clamping angles, how to avoid tear out, reduce tear out, better sanding

Id: _KEw83c8T98

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022