Pocket Hole Mistakes to Avoid / Woodworking Joinery

hello everyone I'm calling canet over the last couple of months I've had a number of emails from people having problems with their pocket hole jig 'he's not getting the kind of results they need so today I'm going to show you a whole series of things to avoid so you can get better results with your pocket hole jig so I made a little rack for my pocket hole jig that way I can put it in my vise and I even have a little holder right there for the bit so that I always know where it is now with this kind of a jig there are two scales on it one of them to show you where to put the collar and there's a scale on both sides here I'm going to show you close-up of that and there's also one here and I'm going to show you close-up of that very important that you double check those every time there's the one on the side and basically you just need to undo this little knot here and move it up and down you can see there's holes for that to go into so I usually use 3/4 inch so I just set it there now let's look at the bit so there's looking down at the jig and typically the bit goes in here and drills from there but look at these two slots on the side here and if you look closely you'll see that there's little scales on each side and depending on the thickness of material that you're using there's scales on each side to show you different thicknesses and that's how you adjust the caller so on this side it's 3/4 of an inch and I have that scale set to the collar at 3/4 of an in so there's a little mock-up of a project that you might be making and maybe it's a carcass for a little table or a little something with the Shelf maybe this is a leg and you look at that and you think that looks just fine but whenever you're working with pocket holes think inside out and upside down and when you flip that over you see the pocket holes but you don't see that from the top and so if you work from the bottom and you work from the inside towards the outside because you're always working from a cramped area when you're working on the inside so if you do that and you work upside down it's going to be a lot easier to put the pocket holes in that you need than trying to do it from underneath so think upside down inside out it's always good to have a good sharp pocket hole bit and if you're not familiar with sharpening drill bits this is a pretty simple one to sharpen now what I recommend the best thing is one of these little diamond sharpening plates this one that I have is 350 on one side and 600 on the other and you really don't need to use much now you can also use these three sided files I don't like these so much because if you're not familiar with these you can actually wreck your drill bit using this so this is much much finer and all you need to do is usually a couple of passes one or two or three passes maybe once every six months it depends how often you're using it and that will keep your bit nice and sharp now it's important to know how to sharpen and you don't when you when you sharpen I'm gonna use this bigger one as an example just so you can see it better this bit goes like this you can see how it digs into the wood and you typically would never sharpen this way so that the the it's going with the with the the angle of the bit you want to sharpen into the bit and the reason for that is that you don't want to leave any bits of metal that little piece of wire that you can get when you sharpen that would curl if you did it this way that little bit of wire is going to curl around here that little bit of metal is going to curl around here and it's very hard to get that out so you're much better off to go into the cut like that and you don't need to take much just a two or three passes with a 600 grit and I can just feel that it just wants to catch my finger now and it makes a big difference when you're using that in the wood it cuts much cleaner and much quicker now I've taken the time to make a series of pocket holes and different kinds of material starting with MDF plywood pine and oak and I want to show you the difference that the wood that you select how that makes a difference to your project so I'm going to start with MDF and just show you how easy that comes apart next I'm going to apply wooden apply wood is actually pretty good but for example if you're making kitchen cabinets it's perfect for making the carcasses out of but you need to make multiple multiple pocket holes but it does work fairly well so don't be afraid to use plywood pine is not one of my favorites for pocket holes it actually comes apart pretty simple so you're probably better to move up to something else so easy that comes apart now we go to oak and look at the difference that oak makes I can't even get that out of there finally I always recommend when you're using pocket holes to use glue and when you're using pocket holes you're almost always using end grain somewhere so there's an grain right there the trick with gluing end grain is to first of all put a coat of glue on there let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes until it's dry or semi hard then put another layer on it then put your pocket holes in it and that will make a substantial difference to the strength of your joints the only time I don't recommend using glue on a pocket whole joint is when you're making outdoor projects and usually you're using things like cedar or other very oily woods and basically glues do not stick to them for longer than a few weeks or a few months and that's because they're getting wet and dry they're getting hot and cold expanding and contracting and glues just don't stick to them long term but pocket holes are perfect for outdoor projects so you use your pocket holes and don't worry about using glue if you want to avoid misaligned wood like this one always always clamp and the reason wood misaligns like this when you try and hold it by your hand is because the pocket holes the screws as they go in they find their own path in the wood and you can't hold it you need clamps to hold that so that it's even it doesn't matter what clamps you use when you're clamping you can use these fancy locking grip kind you can use ordinary C clamps and you can use quick-release clamps whatever it you want will work fine just make sure you clamp so that you make sure that your wood aligns here's another example of a clamping frame you could make one of these yourselves for example if you were making say furniture and you've got square legs for example and you're looking for a reveal and you want it's a quarter of an inch thick you can use that put align that to there lock that down that down on there and now you get perfect alignment and a perfect reveal because you've got it clamped and there's an example of how you can get a perfect reveal in there perfect alignment and you could do that with every one of the legs on the project I want to take a couple minutes to talk about screws for pocket holes and I know a lot of you use these sheetrock screws they're usually a Phillips and the problem there's two big problems with them first of all they're very brittle the heads break off fairly easily and they tend to split the wood and that's because they're flat top screws and there's another example there's a little bit bigger version so you can see why they split the wood because they they flare like this so here's a pocket hole that I've cut in half so you can see and there's a pocket hole with what they call sort of a washer end on it and you can see how it fits in there and when it's tightened up because it has a flat bottom on it it it tends to hold much better it grips much better now the problem with these is that first of all when they go in they have a tendency to want to split the wood and you know that whenever you've drilled used a flattop screw like this whenever you drill it into wood if you haven't countersunk it very often it will split the wood and it will do the same thing inside your pocket hole it'll split that wood because it wants to push it apart like a wedge so that's the first thing the second part is very often if you're only using pine it's probably not a problem because as you can see with pine it's not the best wood for pocket holes but it's not holding very good and it's going to tend to split but it probably is not going to take the hand off what will do that is if you're using a better quality wood like oak you will snap the heads of those off and the third problem with these is this when you look at this group you'll notice at the very top they're sort of a blank area where there's no thread and whenever you've been screwing two pieces of wood together and you put one together and you put a long screw in and sometimes when you're screwing what happens is that wood comes apart on you doesn't it and as you're screwing in the screw is deeper and deeper but the wood doesn't pull together it stays apart so very often you need to pull the screw out push it back down re put it back in and the same problem is happening with pocket holes and that's because the thread goes right all the way up to the top see how it goes up to the top and when it does that when it bites into the bottom here sometimes it will push out like that and what happens is the screw will continue to go in but it doesn't actually pull the wood in it just keeps moving back and forth like that because that's how that works because there's the thread is too high up so those are three problems that you can encounter when using these sheetrock screws here I have three sheetrock screws and you can watch to see how easily the head snap off in this oak the other one I have is a pocket hole screw with a little felt pen mark so you can see it spin around I'm going to drive this in two or three times it will strip the wood and keep spinning and it still won't snap the head off well that concludes my video today on some of the things to avoid that'll help you get better results with your pocket hole jig I'm Colin connect for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 1,019,177

Rating: 4.9359608 out of 5

Keywords: pocket hole, pocket holes, pocket hole joinery, pocket hole jig, kreg jig, kreg, kreg pocket hole jig, pocket jig, pocket screws, pocket hole screws, how to use a pocket hole jig, how to use a kreg pocket hole jig, pocket hole jig diy, kreg jig pocket hole, kreg jig projects, kreg jig pocket hole system, joinery, woodworking

Id: bOrQ9lH8qSc

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020