Secret Tips the Woodworking Pros Won't Tell You

hello everyone i'm colin cannet before i get started on today's video i want to clarify something i said a few weeks ago and that is that if you have a woodworking club or guild and you're looking for a guest speaker on a zoom meeting that if i'm available i would be happy to do that for you and a number of people have cut in touch with me we've already set up a few of these meetings but the one question everybody asks is how much i charge for that it's free i don't charge anything for that it's just my way of giving back to the woodworking community so if you're interested in that get in touch with me and we'll see if we can set something up in the meantime let's get on with this video now i've been really lucky to work with some really good talented woodworkers and carpenters over the years and you kind of pick up little tips and tricks that they use and some of them i've been using for so long i forget that i'm using them and i've developed some myself some modifications along the way so today i want to show you some of those because i think you'll get some benefit from it so let's get started here's a tip that i've been using for a long time and i forget that i even do it anymore and some of you have noticed it but whenever i'm making lines i make a line like this and i've exaggerated that but i put a little tick right near the end and what that tells me is that this is the waist this is the way side of the board and that i want to leave that line and so my saw cut is going to come right down there and that means that i will be leaving that line that i just drew and you can do it on the other side too and it's it's really easy you just do the same thing but before you get to the end of the board i've got a knot down here i'm just going to move over before you get to the end of the board you stop let's do it again stop and you go like that and you can see that was a smaller tick but it's the same thing that is the waist side of the cut and you want to leave that line that you draw so let's do another one there so you go down like that and there's what that looks like and that's the way side and if you do that you'll get absolutely perfect cuts every time because you will know which is the way side and that means that you would be leaving that line and where it becomes really important is when somebody's handing you boards like they were to me and they would draw a line with a carpenter's pencil big thick line and put a tick on it and i would know that they want me to leave that line on there and that would be the waist side of the wood and that would give them a perfect cut so a great little tip for getting accurate cuts every time now very often when i'm gluing boards together i'll arrange them ahead of time however i want the grain to look and in some cases like this one here i don't even have these edges jointed yet but i may arrange some boards to see how they're going to look now when i'm gluing these together i'm going to be taking these apart and joining them but i want to bring them back to the same way they are right now so what i do with that is i use the side of a pencil and i just draw a mountain on there and i use the side to make a wide line just like that and what that tells me it doesn't matter how i take these and put them run them through the jointer however i do them when they come back they can only fit one way even if they're a little bit jointed in there they're still going to fit one way so they're going to look like a little mountain now when you before you glue these up or even after you glue these up best to do it before you can take an eraser and get rid of these but look you can also use rubbing alcohol it works like a charm ordinary rubbing alcohol will get rid of those graphite lines on there just that easily you can see how that's all just disappearing there if i keep working at it and of course the alcohol is just going to evaporate off of there and it's all ready to glue or to joint here's a common trick that woodworkers use to get a better finish on their product now many of you already know that i use water-soluble stains and a lot of people freak out when i say that i use water because it raises the grain and it does raise the grain but look even if you're using oil based finishes you can still raise the grain with water and a lot of wood workers do that and what they do is get a damp cloth you don't want it really sopping wet so that the fish can swim across it it just needs to be a light damp surface coating on there and then you just what you do is you let it sit but the key is that you need to make sure that you let it sit and dry hard because it's going to raise the fibers on the grain and then when that does when it raises the fiber on the grains then you can do a couple of things sometimes i'll use about a 400 grit sandpaper and i'll just lightly go over it maybe two passes at the most the other thing that i often do and this is something an unsung special little tool in the workshop that gets very little tension and that's a scraper and a scraper is perfect for knocking off the tops of those little nubs those little hairs that stick up and you will be astounded the quality of finish that you can get when you do that and i will often put water on and raise the grain before i put the dye on because after i put the dye on it's already been raised once it will raise again a little bit the second time but not nearly as much and it just a very quick one or two passes and once in a while i'll use the scraper after i've used the die but usually just some sandpaper so what we're looking at here is three different combinations of wood and what i want you to see and i've made these demos so that it you can see that is you can see this is a light on light this is a dark on dark and this is a light on dark and what i want you to look at what i emphasized is the connection here that the joint connection and you'll notice that when you're working with light wood and you're going to finish it light your joints you need to pay particular attention to your joints because they stand out from across the room if you make a mistake on a joint when the wood is white um you will see that forever on dark look at the difference you can see it's basically the same i tried to get these exactly the same gap but look at this because it's dark on dark you and and right now you're going to be seeing that joint in there because you're looking at it but when you start looking at furniture you're not going to see that gap and look at here's a combination we don't often use and we should be using more this is a great combination where you have white and dark together and look at that joint just absolutely disappears in fact this is actually the worst joint here if you were to look really close at these this is actually slightly slightly the worst joint but it shows up the least because the darkness is hiding so whenever you're making joints pay attention to what the last finish is that you're going to put on this and that's why we when we're making furniture we always think ahead about what this is going to look like when it's done and i'm not suggesting that you need to use dark stains or dark dyes for all of your projects but i just want you to see that when you are using light colors you need to pay a little bit more attention to making sure your joints are as tight as they possibly can be now here's a little trick that i developed now when you've got legs for example maybe you've got legs for a table that you're working on and you know you twist them around to set them up however you want so the nice edge is showing and then what i will do normally is i would go one two three four now that's what i used to do and you can see what that looks like now the problem with that of course is that after you've worked on the legs and maybe you've tapered them and they've been away from this angle for a while sometimes you forget whether it was whether you were going one two three four um you know you never know don't always know which you know for the one you never know which one was right there and am i looking at them from the back or from the front whatever look at this this is something i developed not long ago and it just it works perfect every time you go like this you go one two three [Music] and you can never ever get those mixed up it doesn't matter how you ever switch them around whatever it is they always come together in exactly the same way and there it is there one two three four so you always know where the front is the sides and the back just a perfect way of marking where you want your legs to be well that concludes my video for today and don't forget there's a full article on that always with these videos on woodwork web and you can get more detail there if you want i'm colin kinnett for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 176,340

Rating: 4.9354272 out of 5

Keywords: secret tips, tips and tricks, workshop tips, workshop tips and tricks, woodworking hacks, woodworking tips and techniques, woodworking for beginners, workbench hacks, woodworking tips and tricks for beginners, workshop hacks tips tricks, woodworking tricks, woodworking hack, woodworking tips, woodworking tips & tricks for beginners, woodworking techniques, workshop hacks

Id: 1LAS28CPSV8

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020