(drilling sound) - [Matt] So one of the
most common questions I get is how to prevent a pocket screw from popping through on the other side when you're joining two pieces like this. Nobody likes to see that. I'm gonna show you how to make sure that never happens again to you. Also, I'm gonna show you how to fix that once it does happen, plus many more pocket
hole tips and tricks. Stay tuned. There is a very simple way to prevent that from ever happening again to you so that the pocket hole screw does not break through the other side of the
board that you're joining. Let me show you how. So this is one by material. This is a onebasix, and we're using the Massca pocket hole jig to
join the two boards together. These are actually three
quarters of an inch thick, and so we've got our setting
at three quarters of an inch. You use the included depth guide to set your pocket hole
bit stop collar depth. The easiest and simplest way to make sure that that doesn't happen to you again when you're drilling pocket
holes, it's extremely simple, you've got your depth stop
at three-quarters of an inch. You set your bit at three
quarters of an inch, and it's still breaking through. Let me show you how to fix it. Simply back off the stop collar, raise it up about an eighth inch. If you're not sure what an eighth inch is, you can just rotate
this depth guide around until it says seven eighths of an inch. Set your depth on your depth
collar at seven eighths instead of three quarters. When you rotate this
around to three quarter, it's going to be one
eighth of an inch higher, or less deep or more shallow, than you're actually needing to drill. This will prevent those
screws from breaking through. This goes for all pocket hole jigs, no matter what brand you're using. I found this to be pretty common, especially when you're joining softwoods like spruce,
pine, things like that because they compress more
because they're softer. Now, if I'm joining those two together with the settings that I created versus the recommended settings, no breakthrough. If it's still breaking through the wood and you set your stop collar
just like I showed you, I'll tell you why that
is in just a minute. If you like that first tip, stick around. I've got a lot more coming. I'm Matt with 731woodworks.com. They call me the pocket hole king. I've also got pocketholeking.com, if you want to go check that out. I want to teach you some things
about pocket hole joinery that may help you along your way in your woodworking journey. I'm here to help you. Let's get started. So when you drive your pocket hole screws, you want to make sure to
adjust down the pressure or the torque that your drill, if it has that setting, you can turn that down so that
it's not driving it as hard. Same thing as your impact driver, you flip that down to a one so that it doesn't
actually force the screw through the other side of the material. So you're making a project, and one of your screws pops through because you didn't have
the depth set correctly, or you overdrove the screw, and now it's popped through your project. And you're just, you're devastated, right? Because now you've got a giant hole with this screw popping through, plus it split the wood a little bit. So how do we fix it? Well, the first thing you got to do is you're going to need
to back that screw out. (drilling sound) You want to back it till it's beneath the surface of the wood. Okay? And typically on a softwood, it has already torn
through some of this stuff. And you want to get that all
that loose wood off of there because it's going to come
off when you sand it anyway. If you're painting this,
it really doesn't matter. You can use some wood filler,
sand it, paint over it. Nobody's ever going to know except for you and the good Lord, right? But if you're staining it, then you're going to want to that to blend with knot holes and things like that. That's where this stuff comes in. I've got a whole video
dedicated to CA glue. Basically this is a colored super glue. It dries extremely fast when you use the accelerator with it. Okay? This stuff is so simple to use. It dries hard as a rock. So you're just going
to take, this is brown. I like to use brown on if I'm staining with dark
walnut, special Walnut, that type colors. If you're staining with a black color, then you would use the
black colored CA glue, but you put a little dab on there. Let it kind of soak in for just a minute. And then you'll take your activator. Spray that activator on there. It's going to dry within 30 seconds, usually within about 15 or 20 seconds. It'll dry that CA glue up. Then you can sand that smooth. And it's going to look like a knothole. And that's how you fix when
those screws pop through like that. When you're putting together, especially like if you're doing panels, so we'll pretend this is a panel glue up where you're making a
tabletop or something. And when you've used pocket holes, if these two edges aren't perfectly square when the pocket holes tighten up, it's going to cause this,
these two pieces of wood, to cant a little bit like that. And when that happens, your tabletop is going
to be all wompy jawed because you'll have say four
or five screws per a board, and every time you tighten one
down, it just gets like that. So make sure these two edges
are actually perfectly square, either with a jointer or
jointing with the table saw like I've done before. I'll link the video in
the description below on how to do joint with a table saw. (drilling sound) I used to put wood together like that. When you don't use the proper clamps, what happens is your two pieces of wood are actually uneven now. You see that lip? So now I have to do something about that. I either have to come in and sand that, or I have to plane that down somehow. So the best way to prevent
that from happening is a face clamp. This is a Massca brand face clamp. You can get any kind you want. I'll put links in description
below to these tools. I didn't have one of these
for a very long time. I really didn't think they were necessary, but I was absolutely wrong about that. So the way these work is
there's two flat pieces of metal on each side, and they actually will tilt to fit the however the wood is
oriented on a flat surface. And then there's a
tightening screw down here that actually adjusts the tension when the clamps come together. Then there's a quick release right there that lets you release it. When you put this face clamp on like that, I've got it close to that screw. This is perfectly flush now because these two pieces of wood are exactly the same thickness. So this is going to keep
that nice and flush. And it's not going to
let it get off balance or out of alignment because
you've got this clamp on there. What I like to do is if you can get a face clamp on it, if it's in a place where you can, is to put it right where the
screws are going to go in. Even if you've got two side by side, I'll clamp that side, and
then I'll move clamp over. Now you can see that that joint
is almost perfectly flush. I mean, it's not exactly perfect, but it is much, much closer. Right down here is perfectly flush. There is a very, very tiny
lip that you could hit with a 120 grit sandpaper. A couple of passes and
that would be flush. The bottom side is flush as well. So those face clamps
are worth every penny. And they're only about,
I don't know, 15 or $20, so I highly recommend getting a couple. Hey, if you're getting
value out of this video, click that subscribe button,
click the bell icon next to it, so you get notified of
all our new content. Another thing to keep in mind is if you're building your project
is going to be outdoors, make sure you use outdoor rated screws versus interior screws. And the way you tell those apart is a lot of times these interior screws are just going to be silver. They're like zinc coated
or something like that. And these outdoor screws
actually have like a, almost a plastic looking coating on there. And they're they're blue. I don't know exactly
what they're coated with, but they feel like a plastic coating. And that keeps them things from rusting. When you've got a project like our recent outdoor sectional build, you want to make sure you're
using outdoor screws on that 'cause the last thing
you want to happen is you've made this awesome project, and in a year or two down the road, those screws start rusting
and breaking on you. You don't want that to happen. Use those outdoor screws
for outdoor projects. They're about the same
price as an interior screw. You just need to decide which
one you're going to need. When you get ready to
put some pocket holes in some of this beautiful purple heart, ooh. If you're drilling into hardwoods like oak, purple heart, cherry, maple, anything like that,
you're using hardwoods, you want to make sure that
you're picking the right screw. So here you see we have
a piece of purple heart, which is a very hard wood. We got a piece of spruce,
which is very soft like pine. On the soft woods like pine and spruce, you're going to be using
those coarse thread screws. And on hardwood, you'll be
using these more fine thread. You really see the difference with them sitting side by side, the differences in the fine
versus the course threads. The fine threads are made
with that self-tapping tip, so that it will help actually
not split your hardwoods. So you make sure you use those
fine threads for hardwood. Another good thing to remember is if you're using plywood, say three quarter inch
or half inch plywood, for to build a project, whether it be cabinets or whatever you're making
out of the plywood, and you need to pocket hole,
join those things together, make sure you measure your plywood because three-quarter inch plywood is rarely ever three-quarters
of an inch actual. So if you're going to be
setting your pocket hole jig at three three-quarters of an inch, you set your bit depth at
three quarters of an inch, it's going to drill too deep. The actual thickness of the plywood, and even in this case here
with it, I've got this piece, it's about a full 16th inch shy of three-quarters of an inch. Well, you want to make sure
you set the depth correct on your pocket hole jig and your bit. One thing that I actually
waited a very long time to buy is this, I think it's
called a 90 degree clamp, but I typically just call
it a thingaMaJig clamp. This one is made from Kreg. It's a really good clamp. It has that same flat metal
piece that will adjust a little bit to however
it's oriented on the board, and it's got a three
eighths inch metal dial actually made into it. And you're just going to clamp
that into that pocket hole. So if you've got two pocket
holes or a long panel, you can actually take this
and help hold it in place. This thing is fantastic. I should have gotten one of these a very, very long time ago. Now, a little more expensive
than your face clamp. This one I think is like $30 or so. I'll put a link in the description below to the thingaMaJig clamp. But these work awesome if
you're trying to join two pieces at a 90 degree angle, which you do a lot in pocket hole joinery. Now, once you have that screw in there, that screw is going to act like a clamp, and you can just move this one off and put a screw in that hole. And you're done. Another neat little trick you
can do with a pocket hole bit is you can loosen this stop collar off, slide it down onto your bit. We'll set this to about halfway of the thickness of the lumber. So you just set that stop collar, to where the shoulder of this
bit, not the blown point, but this shoulder right
here is about halfway of the thickness of your
stock, or your piece of wood, and then you'll just tighten
down that stop collar. Make sure that it's
actually on the flat part of your drill bit, and it doesn't go down into the groove just because it wouldn't tighten up right. So now you can use this
to countersink a screw. I'm joining these two without pocket, If I'm not using a pocket
hole for whatever reason, I want to join these together, all you gotta do now is
you've already got that three-eighths inch hole
for the countersink. You can just take a wood dowel, like this is a three inch dowel, put a little wood glue on it. You will hear when it bottoms out. You just take a flush
trim saw at that point, trim that dowel off. You can sand it flat, and
it'll give you a good little. (sanding noise) Now you can see that dowel is right there. You sanded it flush, and that gives you a nice, a
different option for joinery. If you don't want those
pocket old screws showing, but you still want to
screw everything together, you can just use those dowel
rods and fill that hole. You got to counter, a perfectly drilled three eighths inch countersunk hole. You can use those three eighths
inch dowels to fill that, and then sand them flush. If you're interested in
any of the tools, the jigs, supplies that we're using in this video, there's a link in the description below. It'll take you to those products. I also get a lot of questions asking if they can just use a regular screw instead of a pocket hole screw. I don't recommend that because the pocket hole screw
actually has a flat head, almost like a washer, warsher,
on the end right there. Whereas a typical screw, you see it has that angled head on there. That's going to let it
drive too deep for you, and you're not going to like the outcome because it's going to be
popping through like before, and you're going to have to fix that hole. So I highly recommend just
picking up some pocket screws. Make sure you're getting
good quality ones. I'll drop links in the
description below to some that I recommend so that
you don't get cheap ones that break on you too easy. So this is a cross section. I just cut this board to
show you so that you can see what a pocket hole looks
like from the side. And you see where this
bit has gone in there, and it stops right there, what does that do? You can see actually see the imprint of the long bit right there. It's pretty cool. So that stops right there
and creates that shoulder, but it also has pre
drilled the hole for you. So when you drive your
regular pocket screw in there, it drives down until it hits
the shoulder and it stops. And you can see that the pocket screw's sticking through there. So that's how they work. And that's how they're supposed to work. What happens when you use a regular screw that has that angle head and
doesn't have the washer head just like a pocket screw
has that flat head, when you use this type screw
and it drives down in there, what ends up happening is
that there's no where to stop because that angled head,
so it just continues to go. And you can even see here, it continues to push on through until it actually drive on past the where that shoulder's at. And lastly go too deep
or it'll bust the wood because it wasn't, it wasn't
made for this type of screw. You know what time it is? Power tip time. So my power tip for
pocket hole joinery is to always, always, always have an extra pocket
hole drill bit on hand. If you've been using pocket
hole joiner very long at all, you know that the tips
of these pocket hole bits are very, very brittle and fragile. You'll drop it. It'll hit the pavement. And then next thing you know, well, bam. You've broken the tip off, and it no longer works
as a pocket hole bit. So it actually don't work for anything. You just throw it away. They're not expensive at all. So make sure you pick up a couple. I usually keep at least
two or three on hand because I'm very clumsy. I'll drop the pocket hole bit, and it'll hit the concrete and
then break the tip right off. When you do throw them
away, keep the stop collar 'cause they're still good and
you may need it down the road. Here's a bonus tip for you. This is a rare earth magnet. They are very, very, very sticky. They will stick to metal. This is aluminum. It won't stick to that. It won't stick to that. It won't stick to that. All that's aluminum, but this piece, the actual clamp is metal. It'll stick to that. Why do you need a magnet there? Your bits will stick to it. And so will your Allen wrenches, so that you can adjust
your pocket hole jig. This is extremely handy because it keeps everything right here, especially if you don't
have a box to keep it in, it doesn't get in the way of the clamp. It doesn't get in the way of the material that you're using to
drill pocket holes with. Now I just throw those on there. You can see there, it's a pretty strong magnet. You can actually stick them through from the bottom or on the other side, and it keeps it a little
more out of the way. That's just a good, quick fix for you. You can see it's not in the way of the pocket hole clamp at all. You can just move those back and forth, and it'll hold everything in place so that you don't- (banging) so that you don't lose any of your bits, drivers, or adjustment wrenches. So I get a lot of questions asking what size pocket hole screw you need for the size material that you're going to be using to join together. Go to pockethileking.com. Right there on the front page, I've got a screw guide
that tells you exactly what size screw you're going to need for the material size you're using. These tips are pocket hole king approved. Go to pocketholeking.com. Check the website out. Click that box right there. It's going to take you to the next set of
woodworking tips and tricks. If you click that box, you get that big old virtual fist bump. I thank you so much for
supporting this channel. Click the box. That's the best way you can support us. Thank you very much. I hope this was helpful.
