Tips and Tricks Every Woodworker Should Know - Vol. 2

hello and welcome back to another episode of tips and tricks every woodworker should know the show where you send us your woodworking tips and we talk about show and explain them in today's episode we're going to cover how to get flat panel glue ups with or without a jointer how to cut a nice straight edge onto a crooked board without a jointer the simple way to find the center of boards and circles and how to get accurate inside cabinet measurements thanks to everyone that has submitted tips so far and if you want to submit your own tip check out all the information in the description all right chris let's hear that first tip this first tip actually wasn't submitted by anybody but it's such a core skill within woodworking that we thought it'd be a good idea to include it and it has to do with getting a nice flat panel glue up whether you have a joiner or not so whenever you're putting together a panel typically one of the last things that you're going to do before actually clamping everything together is rip your boards in perfect world when you do this your blade would be at an exact 90 degree angle but as you likely know we don't live in a perfect world and there's a decent chance that well it's not now the problem with this and we'll show an extreme example is that if your blade is off from 90 rather than making boards for a flat panel you're almost making staves for a barrel and the wider your panel is or the more individual boards that are a part of it the worse things are gonna get now if you have access to all of the main tools in a shop a really common solution to this is to use a joiner and what's called the in and out method basically you line your boards up in the orientation that you want them to be in when your panel's glued up then you write in and out on the mating edges and by the way you can ignore these labels you only need to do it where the two edges meet anyway then you'd take one pass on each edge with the face of your board positioned either in or out based on your labels and this will create complementary angles so that you end up with a nice flat panel great but what if you don't have a jointer well thankfully you can use an almost identical approach to achieve this with the table saw but rather than writing in and out we'll write up and down and then rip our boards to the final width with our faces of our boards facing either up or down based on the labels and as you can see even with this really extreme example with a blade that's way out of square you end up with a pretty flat panel it's a trick that can take what's normally a pretty big problem in woodworking and turn it into a piece of cake sean all right this next tip comes from ivar hussa and has to do with getting a straight edge onto a board without using a jointer and i know a jointer isn't a tool that everyone has in their shop so hopefully this can help some people out so the first step in just about any woodworking project is to get your material nice and straight and using a jointer is usually the preferred tool for the job but of course just like with most things there are ways to get a similar result using other tools that you probably already have in your shop and more specifically we're going to talk about how we can do this on the table saw and before we get into it if you like these techniques and want to give them a try just remember to be safe and understand the concepts and your machines before trying anything new ok this first method uses a long straight edge that can be attached to your table saw fence ivar explains that he uses an eight foot long level which is nice because you already know that it's straight or at least it should be now i don't own an eight foot level so to illustrate this technique i'm using an eight foot long piece of oak that i milled straight before filming the idea is to clamp your long straight edge to your table saw fence and what this does is extend the length of your fence which allows us to run a crooked board through the saw and as long as the board is oriented with the concave side against the long fence it can maintain two points of contact through the entire cut whereas with just the normal length fence the curve of the board would follow the fence and you wouldn't get a straight cut so with the first edge cut straight we can remove the long fence then trim the other side of the board straight as usual and as you can see we now have two perfectly straight and parallel edges on our work piece one limitation of this setup is that the board you're cutting can't be too long where it potentially loses those two points of contact so a similar technique we can employ for longer crooked boards and this is one that i've used a lot over the years is to not attach the long straight edge to the table saw fence but instead run it alongside your work piece when making the cut as you can see it's essentially the same concept the only difference is that your work piece can be as long as your straight edge and since they're being pushed through the saw together the two points of contact are maintained throughout the entire cut this technique takes a bit of practice to keep your work piece nice and snug against the straightedge to get a clean cut and you could always get fancy and make a straight edge jig with hold downs and stuff like that but i figured i'd show kind of the most simple version to illustrate the technique obviously both of these techniques are great for crooked boards but don't account for any bow or twist so that said when used in the right situation these techniques can make getting jointer like results without a jointer a piece of cake i already used a piece of cake easy as pie pie works okay so this next one comes in from brandon mueller and he's going to show us how to use a speed square to find the center of a board and this is a pretty common tip that a lot of people already know about in fact brandon said so himself a lot of people already know this but uh maybe so because of that i'm going to show you a few other situations where these same concepts can be really useful hey just wanted to quickly mention that in addition to making woodworking tips videos we also build a lot of woodworking projects honestly that's mostly what we do on this channel we recently built this coffee table and this lounge chair and this desk all of these videos are pretty jam-packed with woodworking tips too so if you're interested go give them a look and either way let's get back to the tips all right so we'll start with what brandon was showing us and the idea was you want to find the center of a board without doing any of that pesky math stuff so here we've got a board of unknown width and we're using our speed square to mark a line perpendicular to one of our edges then it's just a matter of marking two diagonals using the square and making sure that the tips of those diagonals hit your perpendicular mark at the edge then wherever those two lines meet is the center of your board from there if you wanted to strike a line along the entire width of your board just make another of these x's and draw a line that goes through the two points and you've got a perfect halfway mark easy peasy another area where a very similar concept can be useful is finding the halfway point between two specific spots for example let's say we're building a cabinet like this with two dadoes for some vertical partitions and we want to find the halfway point between them to add something so here i'm getting the same board that we were using before and i'm going to randomly cut two kerfs to represent my dados and i don't know how far apart these are well a really easy way to find the halfway point is to get a ruler and angle it so that the inside of your dados or kerfs in this case are hitting two points on your ruler that are easily divisible so here i've got one at the 10 inch mark and another at the 20 inch mark so if i make a mark at 15 inches on my ruler that'll perfectly divide the area between my dados in half and actually there might be a situation where you want to divide something like this into say five equal parts you could mark at 12 14 16 and 18 and you'll have five equal parts okay one last trick and that is that similar concepts can help you find the center of things that aren't square or rectangular say for example you've got a circular top and you need to find the center of the circle what you could do is draw any two random lines that go across your circle like this by the way for all my geometry heads out there i believe these are called chords anyway then find the center of your line and draw a right angle line that goes towards the center of your circle and wherever these perpendicular bisector lines meet is the center of the circle all right if you hate math good news that was the worst of it and really what we were doing there was eliminating math if you think about trying to find the center of an x versus trying to divide 9 in 17 30 seconds by three i think you'll agree that it's simple as a scone sean all right before we get into this next tip let's go ahead and thank squarespace for sponsoring today's video both chris and i have been using squarespace to build and maintain our websites for years now and honestly it's one of the best choices we made when starting our businesses at the time i had no idea what i needed to do to build a website but squarespace makes it super easy to get up and running with plenty of professional looking templates to choose from as well as making things like purchasing domains really simple squarespace also has plenty of e-commerce tools to help you grow your business things like inventory management a simple and secure checkout process and unlimited products allow us to easily manage online transactions and not get bogged down with mundane tasks so that we can devote more time to doing the things we enjoy like learning woodworking tips so if you're thinking about starting a website or even if you already have one go check out squarespace to see if it might be a better option for you head over to squarespace.com 4i's for a free trial 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 let's get to that last tip all right this next one comes in from bill parrish and is all about getting accurate inside dimension measurements we've all run into the situation where we're trying to take a measurement for the inside of a cabinet or something like that and we try to jam our tape measure into the corner and fold it up against one side and pretend like this is good enough but let's be honest this isn't very good and there have to be better ways to do this and luckily there are better ways to do this so i want to talk about a couple different techniques then get into the one that bill sent us so this first one which i would rank as mildly better is that most tape measures have a dimension written on them that indicates the length of the tape measure body this means that you can push the tape into the cabinet and making sure the hook end is up against one side and the tape measure body is up against the other side then we can just add that two and a half inch dimension to whatever we're reading on the tape measure and we have our inside dimension another technique which i would put as medium better is using a tape measure in conjunction with another measuring tool and in my case i'm using a six inch rule by placing it against one side then using my tape measure from the other side i'm able to accurately measure to the end of the rule then just add six inches to that measurement pretty simple and very effective all right now this last one which is what bill sent us and i would consider full-blown spicy is to get rid of the tape measure altogether at least for a minute and just get yourself a couple sticks as long as they are longer than half the width of the cabinet opening all you have to do is push them to either side then clamp them together where they overlap in the middle then you can take this whole thing out of the cabinet and measure end to end to get a much more accurate measurement simple and effective manageable as a muffin all right thanks bill chris what else do you have for us nothing i guess not even a tape ball so i guess that's the end of the video but if you want to check out more woodworking tips and tricks we're going to link to our other videos in the description and if you want to submit a tip we'll have all the info there as well so have a great day you

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 919,741

Keywords: woodworking, wood working, wood work, woodwork, wood, woodworking tips, woodworking tricks, woodworking tips and tricks, carpentry tips, DIY woodworking, flat panel glue-ups, how to get flat panels, how to rip a board on a table saw, ripping crooked boards, how to find the center of a board, how to find center of a circle, how to measure inside of a cabinet

Id: hp4ZYt6JNEI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022