Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Woodworker's Journal

Labeling Setscrew, Allen Wrench Sizes Many shop machines and accessories have one or more Allen-style set-screw for securing handwheels, adjusting blade guides and other functions. Problem is, most are different sizes, and some are metric, others Imperial. I have spent a lot of time finding and trying various Allen wrenches before getting one to fit. I put a stop to this hassle by locating every setscrew in my shop and marking its size beside the screw. I also tag my Allen wrenches with a tape label to avoid the problem of trying to read their tiny sizing stamped on the wrench. End of problem! Bill Wells Olympia, Washington Plug Fits Tape-side Up Here’s an annoyance about polarized tool plugs: it seems like about half the time I try to stick…

Hand tools, in my opinion, have an important place in every woodworking shop. This is not to say that it makes sense to step back in time and ignore the truly remarkable power tools that are available to home shop woodworkers today (my shop is replete with top-notch examples of them). Instead, there are times when hand tools make more sense, in terms of appropriateness and efficiency. That is what this department is about. What are Backsaws? A backsaw is a handsaw with a metal (or today sometimes plastic) spine at the top edge of the blade, which stiffens the blade to facilitate precise cuts. All backsaws are either rip style for cutting with the grain or crosscut style for cutting across the grain. Backsaws for rough work have bigger…

You use your table saw routinely for ripping and crosscutting wood in perfectly straight lines, guided by the fence or miter gauge. Tilt the blade or adjust the gauge, and you get straight bevels or mitered cuts. No argument, that’s the table saw’s bread and butter. But beyond those basic techniques are several others you should consider adding to your arsenal of skills. Let’s take a look at three of the most useful ways to go beyond the basics. Cove Cutting Coves are common in molding, trim, picture frames, box components and more. Small coves, like simple coved trim, are easy to make with a router. But for wider, deeper coves for crown molding, box sides and other larger projects, you need either a shaper with large-scale cutters or a…

A few years ago, I had a rule about using multiple species of wood on a single project: Don’t. But recently I have had a change of heart when it comes to mixing species, especially when those various pieces create an interesting geometric design. I think this table is a good example of exactly that. The chevron (not her-ringbone!) design is interesting to look at but not overpowering. I used six different wood species, but of course that is a completely subjective decision; you could go with more or less. The table is easy to build and quite sturdy. As a dad with little kids, sturdy is very important to me. This table will need to withstand some rough-and-tumble times! Starting Out The core of the tabletop is two pieces…

This Glue Bottle Dock (item 61892; $6.99) from Rockler eliminates the hassle of inverting a glue bottle and waiting for the glue to reach the nozzle during a glue-up, because the glass-reinforced nylon holder stores the bottle upside down so the tip remains primed with glue. No shaking or repeated squeezing is required. A built-in opener pops up the nozzle of Titebond® glue bottles, so you can grab and open the bottle with one hand. A flat, textured recess underneath enables the tip to be closed with a bump and scraped clean when needed. There’s also a bottom plug with a rubber gasket, offering easy clean-out of wet glue that drips from the tip. The Dock fits 4, 8 and 16 oz Titebond bottles, Rockler glue bottles and bottles from…

Threaded inserts and T-nuts provide a way to use bolts or other threaded hardware to attach things like legs, headboards or backsplashes to furniture quickly and easily, with the added benefit that the pieces can be taken apart — or knocked down — with very little fuss. While it may seem as if the uses for this sort of joint would be limited, it is surprising how often they come in handy. And sometimes they are the only solution. It may appear that inserts and T-nuts are essentially the same in function: they provide a threaded “nut” embedded into wood or some other substrate. The main differences are in how easy they are to mount and how strongly they hold. Understanding those details will help you decide which insert is…

Only six sleuths ventured guesses as to the purpose of Rae St. Amand’s square October mystery device, but all of them zeroed in on a single object it was once used for. “It’s a butt gauge for laying out door hinges,” says Tom Altman. Well, Tom, other readers here will debate you about its usefulness as a hinge layout tool, but they’ll agree that this Granger item is made for doors. “It looks like an antique rim lock, the predecessor to today’s deadbolt,” speculates David Underhill from Monument, Colorado. He adds, “I don’t know the size, etc., so it could be a latch for a cool box or similar.” “It’s a door lock,” assures Robert Schweizer of Williamsburg, Virginia. “The round knob operates the bolt that is locked into position…

Math has never been one of my strong suits, but with that said, even I know that a billion is a really big number. To help wrap my head around just how huge that number is, I found this comparison. If I told you that I was going to visit you in one million seconds, you’d have to get ready in about 11.6 days — less than two weeks. By contrast, if I informed you that I would be visiting you in one billion seconds, you would not see me for about 32 years. It’s a big number. Why this number might matter to you is that over the next decade, the U.S. Forestry Service is planning to plant over a billion trees. (“US to plant 1 billion trees as…

Take a close look at the corner joints of nearly any cabinet door made these days, and you’ll likely find some variation of rail-and-stile joinery, such as the example shown above. These sturdy, attractive joints can be made easily in a home workshop with a matched set of rail-and-stile router bits, using a router table equipped with a mid-to-full-size router. The stile cutter (see inset photo, above) cuts a centered groove along both a door’s stiles and rails for fitting wood panels or sometimes glass. The bit also mills a decorative profile, called sticking, along the inside front-facing edge of the door parts. This shape may be as simple as a chamfer or any number of different roundover, filet or ogee forms, depending on the bit set’s design. Because the…

If you have a modestly sized shop where every square foot of floor space counts, a combination jointer/planer machine like this JET JPJ-12BHH could make loads of sense for your lumbersurfacing needs. That’s because it piggybacks a 12"-wide jointer on top of a 12" planer, yet its welded-steel cabinet occupies a footprint of under 4 square feet. The duo enables you to face-joint stock as wide as you can plane. JET equips the jointer with a pair of heavy-duty cast-iron tables that have a ground finish to deliver accuracy and flatness. They’re parallelogram style, in order to maintain a close distance to the cutterhead and to allow precise depth-of-cut adjustments. The overall jointer table length is a respectable 55". Unlocking a knob and hinging the jointer up on its side…

General Finishes recently launched Dead Flat, a durable matte sheen now included in its High Performance Topcoat lineup. It’s a single-component water-based cabinet and furniture-grade finish that can be brushed, sprayed or rolled. Christine Adams, marketing director for General Finishes, reports that this cross-linked polyurethane is an ideal topcoat for protecting figured woods and can be used over paint that already has a flat sheen. “With Dead Flat, the beauty of the wood grain displays with natural clarity, and the color of painted projects shows with more intense saturation,” Adams says. Due to recent advances in its patented polymer technology, General Finishes has formulated Dead Flat without the use of the durability-reducing matting agents required in the past. This gives it the durability of higher gloss finishes with a…