Woodworking Techniques 99% of Beginners Don't Know

woodworking is in essence about techniques different types of techniques that allow us to do different things when we first start out we really don't know much maybe we know how to cut and hammer nail and we may not be all that good at that but as we do more and as we experiment more we learn more and more techniques which allow us to do things better and allow us to do things that we couldn't do at first in the old times we this was pasted down from father to son uh that's where I got my start and that's where many have gotten their start now with the Internet it's much easier to pass that information on even so it takes somebody that knows what they're doing to start out there are some techniques which seem to be going wi the Wayside because they've been replaced by other things for example the moris and Tenon joint which is a staple of Woodworking and has been for centuries has largely been replaced by for a lot of people by either using pocket hle screws or by using dominoes nevertheless being able to do mors and tons is is still a very valuable skill and with modern power tools there's easier ways to do it than with a hammer and chisel so I want to present to you a few different techniques that I have found useful and that are being done with power tools that you'll find useful as well in your own woodworking let's take a look the traditional way to assemble Furniture whether we're talking a dining room chair or a Trestle for a table is with more dis inen joints but a lot of Woodworkers are afraid to try that out well it's not the Tenon that's a problem it's cutting the mortise and I'm going to show you an easy way to cut a mortise on a drill press at one time mortise and tenant joints were always cut by hand and you can still do that but it's a timec consuming process and a lot of Woodworkers don't want to do that so there is Machinery available to do it there's actually a machine it's called a mortise cutter and it's a specialty tool it's used just for cutting mortises you would find one in a a furniture shop whether it's a custom furniture shop or more of a production factory uh they' be likely to have something like that but that's a bit expensive for you and I as home wood workers and I don't have one but what I'm going to show you is how you can convert your drill press assuming you have a drill press a drill press is a whole lot cheaper in the morning machine to do this and it requires adding this to your drill press now this part is there just to hold this part and keep it from turning this is a two-piece drill bit or drill bit and chisel the outer portion is a square chisel okay and then it has a specially made drill bit that fits right in it it's kind of like a Brad Point drill bit and the two work together the drill bit hogs out the material and the Chisel squares up the corners and pushes that material into the drill bit so it can be cut up so to do this we we attach the this framework the mortising framework to the the drill press and it's attached up here above the rotating part okay so it's attached firmly and its only purpose is to hold this and keep the outer part the Chisel part from turning then we want to set up a fence on our table saw and the fence has to be exactly parallel with this surface okay that's the trickiest part of the whole operation is setting that up parallel I've set it up in this case so it's a/ inch away from this Edge because the piece I'm going to be going ahead and cutting my mortise in is an inch and a half wide and I'm cutting a half inch mortise down the middle of it so the idea here is that I'm going to use the drill press to create a a series of overlapping square holes and when they're all put together I will have my mortars the finished piece doesn't exactly look great when it comes out of the mortish process because the edges are scallop from cutting so many different slots but a few minutes work with a chisel can clean that up and I literally mean a few minutes and it's not a very hard process to straighten that out with a one-inch wide chisel now the bottom of the slot is still going to look sloppy and that's okay because when I cut the mortars I cut the mortars deeper than what the Tenon is leaving myself a little bit of extra space there so that I don't have to try and bottom out the Tenon we really don't want to do that and in fact if you look at old furniture antique furniture and you cut apart Mor and tens you find that that the mortise was usually deeper than the tenant allowing that extra space so that they didn't have to square out the bottom of the mortise perfectly and they can let the tennis set into Motors and tenons are a great way to join wood together and I'm going to show you how to cut tenons on your table saw first you're going to need a tenoning jig like this okay this is made out of scrap and it took me a whole 15 minutes to put it together I've got a piece of plywood here and you can see I've made a saddle here and this is to go over my fence it needs to fit snugly over the fence enough that it doesn't really wobble much but not so snugly that it doesn't move smoothly okay so there's two things that are critical here one is that this is exactly square and the other is that this is exactly Square as long as those two are square and it fits snugly on your fence then we can run it over the blade with our piece clamped here and cut our tenons straight now that I've got my jig I need to set up my saw properly okay there's two Dimensions I'm really concerned about here number one is the height of my blade and number two is the distance between the blade and the backboard of my jig okay because that's going to determine how my tendon gets cut so I set the height of my Blade with a digital height gauge like this and uh the way I used it is is I zeroed it on the table and then I just cranked the blade up until it read the depth I wanted in this case half an inch okay to set the distance between my blade and the backboard here and and when I say the blade I'm talking about the side of the blade that's closest to the backboard I also want that to be a half an inch because what I'm going to try and do is cut out the outside part of my tenant okay not the not the inside part so I've set that to a half inch using a steel ruler rather than the gauge on my table the gauge on my table is about a 302 of an inch off and in Mortar senten jery you've got to be snug okay so with that done I can take my board and I've marked my board here that what I want to cut out uh that isn't actually necessary but I did it and I'll clamp my board to my jig okay so this is holding it vertical in this direction and this direction and making sure it doesn't move and the idea is I'm GNA cut make a cut on this side and then flip it around and make a cut on the other side okay so the results of that is I now have two slots going in here but I still don't have a tenant I've got to cut it the other direction as well so I'm use the miter gauge on my table saw to do this I've got a slider so I'm going to use the miter gauge if I did not have a slider I'd probably use a uh sled a miter sled uh or cross cut sled on the table saw I've gone ahead and reset the height of my blade to a quarter of an inch because that's how much I need to cut out of there so there's the result of my second cut I've got both shoulders cut off here okay and my 10in sticking out but I haven't put the shoulders on these two parts now I could do that on table saw just as well but I find it easier to do that with a hand saw so I've got my piece chucked up in my my visce here and I'm going to use a little L-shaped block as a guy for this cut and I'm using a a Japanese saw this is actually a dovetail saw I like the Japanese saws cuz they cut on the P stroke and now for the other cut I can just use the shoulder here from my my existing cuts on the table saw as a guide and there we have it one last cut and that tendon is ready to go the purpose of jointing boards running them through the Joiner to give us nice clean straight edges is so we can Edge glue boards together now there's other reasons you might do that and actually most of the lumber you buy in the lumber yard has already had that done to it assuming it hasn't warped of course but if you're going to use Hardwoods if you're going to buy hardwood from a hardwood supplier it's not going to be jointed what do you do well the oldfashioned way is to use a jointer plane that's a long plane very long flat shoe that allows you to make a a long cut and you make sure you can get those waves out of the board works great it still works today and you can buy Modern Joiner planes that have a a cast iron shoe instead of a wood one like this one but it's a lot of time and a lot of work okay what if you want don't want to do that and you don't have a jointer well you can joint boards on your table saw now there's a couple Keys here one of them being that your table saw L runs true and I mean by not having a lot of waiver in your blades because you don't want a lot of Saw tooth marks in there okay the other is that your your fence has got to be exactly parallel with your saw blade otherwise you're not not going to get a clean straight cut okay so assuming we've got those two things what do we we do well I don't have either of these edges that I know is straight so but here's a board that I know is straight so what I'm going to do is attach this board to this board and I use one of my favorite clamps for this double-sided masking tape so with my double side masking tape I can take my known straight board and attach it here and it really doesn't matter if this is absolutely parallel with the edge of my board because I'm going to create my own parallel here okay so with that done I can run this through my my saw and cut this Edge straight so I'm going to move my fence over so I'm just cutting off the minimum of what I need to do so if we look at the piece I cut off up at this end there was no piece there was just sawdust and down here there's no sawdust in the middle there was this thin strip we cut off and then down here at this end there was a little so so obviously this Edge was not straight okay that's the whole purpose of this exercise so now I can take this piece off and I know this Edge is straight so I can set it up here yeah it might be a good idea if I took my masking tape off too I don't want to gum up my saw blade and I can reset my fence and I it's up to me whether I take off all my Wayan or not okay I'm going to go ahead and set it to where I think I'll get rid of all my way and now I can do this Edge so now I know that I've got two edges that are straight and parallel to each other now I still haven't done anything with the surfaces okay typically you'll do one ede and then do your surfaces and then do the other Edge it can be done either way so I now have two edges that I know are parallel to each other I know they're perpendicular to the surface face because I set my saw blade perpendicular using a square so now I've got a board that I can say is jointed other than pling it it's ready for Edge gluing there's another way the table saw is really useful as a jointer and that is if you do a glue up and it doesn't come out right now you may not be able to see this on the camera but there's a little bit of Gap here and a little bit of Gap here even though the middle part of this joint is nicely glued together okay happens all the time especially if you're using Lumber that you've gotten for the lumber yard and you haven't jointed that Lumber okay a lot of people what they'll try and do is close that up with by putting excessive pressure on with their bar clamps sometimes that works but if you do it you're putting stresses in there and it'll probably open up eventually okay so what do you do if this happens well you joint it on your table saw and what I mean by that is I'm going to go ahead and cut this line on the table saw so I'm going to set my my fence so that my cut will literally be right down the center of where I've got these boards jointed [Music] together so now what I've got is I got two edges that meet up perfectly and I can reglue this and I know it'll come out right miter joints are one of the simplest joints around yet at the same time one of the most difficult to cut why is that well it's because the amount of precision that's required even being off a fraction of a degree is enough to leave a gap and when you figure going all the way around a frame doing four miter joints it the problem gets multiplied because every fraction your off gets added up going around you end up with at least one corner that really looks bad now a lot of times we fill that with sawdust and and that works pretty well but it's a whole lot better if we don't have as much to fill so how do you get a clean miter joint well to understand that we got to start with where the problem's coming from and the problem's coming from that every time you make a miter joint you've got to do a setup actually you've got to do two because if you think about you're cutting from two different angles so you've got to do the setup from one angle and then the setup from the other angle if we can get away from the setups we can improve the quality of our miter joints and that requires some sort of a fixture and the fixture I recommend is using a miter sled on a table saw now I've used miter saws and I've got a radial arm saw sitting back here and I've done good frames good miter joints on both but the setup is your real difficulty and even with indents you know that's set that 45° sometimes you don't get it so here's here's the way to do this make yourself a miter sled now you've probably seen cross cut sleds and you maybe even have a cross cut sled the difference between a miter sled and a cross cut sled is the cross cut sled is you know designed for 90° a miter sled is designed to give us our miter so we're doing two 45s on the same sled now this is made just like any other sled you got a couple of Runners that sit down into the miter slots on the saw and a table of course you need a piece here to keep from falling apart but the real difference is this piece right here this triangle and this triangle is is an exact 90° now I know it's an exact 90° because I've measured it with a known good Square okay so I I started off before anything finding myself a piece of wood that I had a known good square and one of the easiest way to do that is just take a corner off of a sheet of plywood or maybe a scrap of plywood or you know you got a good Corner okay this is 3/4 inch thick material that works out pretty well so then I made my sled you know starting with the runners you've probably seen this done now I want to mention something here about Runners a lot of people do the trick where they put pennies or washers down in the tracks here and leave do that so that they they can have the the track not hit the bottom all the way when when those are out of there okay I do it a little different I like to make my track sit a little proud so that my miter sled isn't sitting on the table why do I do that less friction because the only that's friction is my runners okay and then to even reduce that friction further I take a block of beeswax and run it across those Runners smoothing them out and acting as a lubricant as it's running in the tracks here okay so you you put your your Runners you put your table or your your base for your sled and you make sure that the that the base of the sled is perpendicular to your blade how do you do that you use a square right use either a a speed square or a tri Square run your blade up and make sure this is perpendicular to the blade okay it really doesn't matter if the table itself is it matters if if this is then the next thing you want to do is you want to put your your known good 90° piece of wood mount it here here and you want to make sure it is 45° to this how do you do that again you use a square now the tri square is not going to work for that actually what I used was a drafting triangle I set that up up against the the fence here that I know is perpendicular blade and I mount my board here so it's 45° to that now you can do the exact same thing with a speed square okay put the speed square and then do the same thing the only reason I use the drafting triangle is it's a little bigger so now with that made and all attached together I can use it to cut my pieces okay but here's what I want to show you here's the trick to making sure it works every time even if you're sleds not perfect first I'm going to cut one piece [Music] so I cut this piece on this side which means it's this side of my corner okay now I take the other piece and cut it on the other side you always want to make sure you cut them on opposite sides now when I bring those together I know I've got a perfect 90° because this is perfect 90° what I'm referencing off of and we can check that out by putting our Square in here and there we've got it okay now you not sure that works okay here's a frame I made using this miter sled this is out of Oak it's 2 2 and 1/2 in by 28 1/2 in all four of my Corners are tight why I did it on the sled one of the the really cool things about this type of sled is that even if everything's a little off as long as I'm cutting one piece from this side and one piece from this side and this is 90° that'll always end up being 90° there's a lot of different things that can go wrong with a lumber that we buy all falling in the category of warp it could be twisted it could be CED it could be uh bowed whatever the worst is having a piece of wood that's Twisted I'm going to show you how to fix that warped CED Twisted wood whatever it might be is pretty hard to use in the workshop generally speaking we end up having a flat now now this is why a lot of Woodworkers Buy their wood as rough saw Lumber and run it through the Joiner and planer themselves what do you do if you get a board like I've got this piece of really nice popler here that I was going to use for something until I found that it was very badly Twisted now twisting is the worst I mean warping cutting cupping you can usually cut out some good pieces but twisting that's really tricky so let me show you how you get rid of twisting now the there's there's more than one way to do this okay uh originally they would do it with a plane with a hand plane uh some people do it with a jointer but that requires a really big jointer like an 8 in wide with a long bed to be able to do it I'm going to do it with a planer and I'm going to do it with a planer mostly because a lot of us have planers but we don't have a big jointer okay so I'm I've got to have a good board to use as a reference surface as a as a bed okay or as a sled and the board I've got here I've checked it it's flat it's not Twisted it's not cup so I'm going to attach my Twisted board to my good board I'm using a couple of wedges these are just normal wedges like door wedges on on both ends and the purpose of those is to give it some support so I no longer have any rocking here okay next thing I'm going to do is hot milk glue the two together yeah I know that sounds a little crazy but the advantage of hot not gluing it is that it'll come apart again okay so now the two pieces are are attached together I'm ready to go to the planer okay the idea here at the planer is I'm going to take as many panes are as necessary to get this surface flat and I it'll be easy to tell when I get there because uh I'll be able to see that the entire surface has been machined okay the the board is is a little bit old it's a little discolored and that Works in my favor this time because I can see easily whether or not I've cut it if I didn't have that I would take a pencil and draw a squiggle all across it so I can see when I've [Applause] [Music] cut I've lost a little bit thickness of my board is but as you can see the entire surface here has now been plain so this side I know is not Twisted now I got to deal with the other side okay so my next step now is to take the two boards apart which really isn't all that hard although the the planer puts an awful lot of force on the boards when it's cutting the rollers actually keep things stable so doesn't take much to take the two apart as we can see that side of the board is no longer rocking so I've accomplished what I want to do now what I've got to do is make this side of the board parallel to this side so I'm going have to go back to the planer and plane this side hopefully I won't have to take off a [Music] [Applause] [Music] lot so there we go now instead of having a board that is was basically scrap and unusable I have a usable board both surfaces are parallel with each other now I have lost a little thickness in the process this board start out as normal S4s which is 3/4 of an inch thick and it is now about 100 thousands less so it's uh it's basically um just a shade over 5/8 of an inch thick it's still usable I need to keep that thickness in mind because whatever project I use it on I can't Ed glue this with 3/4 in pieces I'll have to use it in some other way but it's at least now it's usable Lumber as opposed to before when it was essentially scrap dominoes are the big thing in Joiner today a lot of people like to use them you see a lot of videos where people are using dominoes for joining things together let me say first you don't need dominoes to make the wood strong the wood's strong in of itself The Dominoes aren't going to change that where dominoes really come in a lot of Handy though is for aligning pieces let's say you're trying to make it an EDG glued tabletop and you're concerned about warpage or even if you're dealing with slabs and you're trying to get them aligned right those dominoes can make a lot of difference okay but that ,000 machine is a little rough to pay for so I'm going to show you how you can do the exact same thing using a $39.95 Dowling jig now this is obviously for doing diing we're not going to be doing diing with it well one of the things that allows us to do is put two bearings in or put two bushings in 3/4 of an inch apart and so I've got two quinch bushings in here now I'll go ahead and Mark two pieces of wood here 3/4 of an inch and we want to make sure we get the exact same marks on both pieces that is critical because we want to drill obviously the same holes in both pieces okay so I'm going to start with this one here and I'm going to go ahead and put my jig on here now there's a little window down here where I can align those two marks with the center line of these two bushings now with that done I'm going to drill two4 inch holes in here where those two bushings are so now I've got two holes but that's not enough I still want the rest of my slots so all I've got to do is move my jig over a little bit and drill a series of overlapping holes between those two outer holes okay so now I've got a slot although it's kind of scalloped a little we'll just a lot of the flutes of the drill bit to clear that out okay so there's my slot in one piece now I need to do the exact same thing in the matching piece remember the only time we need to use both holes both bushings is for that first pair of holes everything else is just done with one you really can't round over the edges of the Tenon or the Domino with a router bit because it's too thin this is only a/4 of an inch thick and it's just shy of an inch wide so what I'm doing is rounding it over with a block plane which really only takes a few Strokes like that then I can cut it to length and have my dominoes now that than cut kns and the I can go ahead and put in my Domino there we go there's our connection

Channel: Sawinery Woodworking

Views: 17,845

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking techniques, woodworking tips

Id: mhbAZX79baE

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2024