Essential Skills For Superior Accuracy in Woodworking - Tips and Tricks

I'm Jonathan Katsamosis, and today I want to do something a little bit different. We're going to depart from our regular build videos, and I wanted to talk about the things that make you more accurate as a woodworker. These are things that I wish I had known earlier when I first started out, but they are not beginner tricks. Some of them are a little bit easier than others, but this is how I am ultra accurate when I'm cutting and fine woodworking. So I'm going to take you through several different processes I use with hand tools, the table saw, and drilling on the drill press, or with a hand drill to make very accurate cuts and holes. So I'm going to go ahead and start showing you the tools I use, what I use them for, and we'll start with our hand tools. So let me take you down to the bench here and we'll get started. OK, so when it comes to accuracy, there's close and then there's really accurate. William Ng, who is a fabulous teacher and woodworker, once said to me, good joinery is done with a pencil, great joinery is done with a marking knife. And I think a marking knife is number one when it comes to accuracy. I use it in every single project for every single cut that needs to be accurate. They come in lots of shapes and sizes. Here's three of them here. What I prefer is the thinner, the better. And so you can even use a razor blade if you don't have a marking knife. A razor blade works great. But this was one that I had made from a guy on Etsy that is really, really thin. I really like it. It just doesn't quite fit anywhere in my vest, so I don't use it all the time. But when this is kind of my favorite marking knife, this Narex, and then this is a Swiss made one that I also really like. Marking knives are where it's at and pencils are are good for rough dimensioning. But really, they're just not accurate. A pencil line is thick. It pushes away from your square, so it's not right on your line. So I don't really like to use those for anything other than rough stuff. Another thing that's essential in accuracy is squares. I have three squares here, a combination square, a Veritas layout square and an engineer's square. An engineer's square is great because it's small. You can put it up next to the blade of your tool and see if it's straight or you can hold it as a visual guide when you're drilling. A combination square is obviously great. It does 90 and 45. It's great for measuring, marking out. And also a good little trick with these is that it comes with a little scribe that's like a marking knife. So if you can't find your marking knife or you don't own one, there is one in the bottom of your combination square. Another essential tool in marking out, especially over long distances, are marking gauges. They're great. There's several different styles here. This is a mortising one. It has two pins on one side, a single pin on the other. This is a wheel gauge with a micro adjust feature. The pin style ones are not my favorite because if you're going along the grain, it can sometimes get caught in grain and push away and not be accurate. Whereas a wheel gauge works both cross cuts and rip cuts very, very well. I also like to use dividers. These are great for laying out dovetails as well as drawing circles. You can also use them as sort of a pair of calipers for marking out. You can just slide it along the edge, creating a nice straight line. But these are, these are great as well. When it comes to cutting of course, number one is good saw technique. That's, that's the best. And I recommend you practice that any chance you get. Anytime a cut doesn't matter, use a combination square and a marking knife, make a perfectly straight line and practice with your hand saw and you'll get better over time. But if you're not great at it like me, then it's time to cheat using magnets. And so this is the magnetic shooting board with 45 degree and 90 degree saw guide on it that I made. There's a great video. There'll be a link down in the description and up in the corner here. This is the Katzmosis magnetic dovetail jig. It has a 90 degree shoulder side. I like to use that for cross cuts. So let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about here and we'll get started with the hand saw. Okay. So any good cut is going to start with marking out and you can do that a variety of ways with a tape measure or using your combination square. Let's say we want to take a, an inch and a half. So what I would do is I would take my square, set it to an inch and a half. I would then take my marking knife and come in exactly flat against it and just hold it there. It's really easy. And then depending on whether you're left-handed or right-handed you would slide your square right up to it. Do one soft line and one strong line. Now I didn't have my square long enough here. So what's great about a marking knife line is you can find it again very easily. So now I know I'm in my line. I'm going to slide my square up to it and do the whole piece. Another great feature of using a marking knife is again, you can find your line. So now I know I'm right in it. So I can set my square to the depth of my board, slide it right up to my marking knife. And now I know I'm right in that line and then I can mark it out. And our line is perfectly around our board. Now when it comes to cutting this piece, there's a lot of different ways that you can do it. When you're hand sawing, your cuts never going to be perfect 90 unless you're Rob Cosman or Matt Eslia. So what I like to do is when I make my cuts, I'll get close to my line. So one thing that I like to do is I won't cut right on my line to start. What I'll do is I'll get close. So I'll take my cut here and I'll get just to the left of it. And I'll do a little backwards stroke to get my saw in kind of the right place. I'll start sawing, getting as close to my line as possible. And what I do is I check the reflection to make sure my board looks straight. If it looks crooked in any way, your, your saw is not plumb to the board. So then I'll start my cut, making sure I stay on the way side of my line, just looking down my cut. And then what I'll do is I'll look at my cut, make sure, see it's off a little bit. I'll put my reference edge against my shooting board here, and then I'll just perfectly take it back down to my line. And there we are perfectly down to our line. We can check that for square. It's perfectly square. And that's how we have accuracy. And it all starts with that marking knife line, which is by far the most important part in the beginnings of accuracy. Let's go over to the table saw. I'm going to show you how I get it done there, both rip and cross cut. And then we'll head over to the drill press. When you're doing a cross cut on the table saw, there's several ways to accurately mark it out. Both involve, of course, a knife line. One is a marking gauge where you would take your marking gauge, set it to a specific distance and mark a line across. But what's really important is the front face. That's going to be closest to your saw blade. Same thing with a marking knife. You would again, mark a line across and then down the face. Let's, you would first find your marking knife line, slide your square up to it, and then mark your line. So you have two teeth and one points this way. And one points this way. It's a alternate tooth bevel blade, ATB. And what you want to do is find the tooth that is going to be on the side of the line that you want to cut to. So in our case, it's the tooth facing on this side of the blade, and we're going to bring our board right up to it with our marking line and put that tooth right up against the line. So you can see here that I've got the tip of that tooth right in my marking knife line. And then we know that when we cut this, it's going to perfectly cut that line. And so I'm going to lower the blade so you can see that. So we won't cut all the way through here. And I'm going to make that cut. Hold our marking knife up to our line. I'm going to find my line there. You can see that we perfectly took our line there. Another way to get a very accurate cut on a table saw and have it be repeatable is with a stop block. This is my new universal no deflection stop block that's on sale on my website. And you would do the same thing. You would get right up to your blade and this time we're going to do it with the alternate tooth because let's say we want our piece to be that long. We can just line it up perfectly with our line there. And then we can move our stop block right up to it. Now what's great about this stop block is it has a micro adjust feature. So let's say we make our cut at our stop block just like that. And we realize that our board is too long. So what we can do is micro adjust it. And so what I would do then is maybe slide a business card, depending on how much is off, you could use a feeler gauge. I'd then hold my board in, loosen the micro adjust feature. You could slide it over and make your adjustment cut. And this is a great way to sneak up on a cut if you need it to be dead on perfect. So let me show you how we do that with rip cuts. When it comes to rip cuts, marking out is a lot the same. You can use a marking gauge to mark a line. You can use a pair of calipers, which is one of my favorite tools for accuracy because you can just dial it in. So let's say we wanted to cut exactly a quarter of an inch. We would lock that in and then I could just drag it along the sides like a marking gauge and you get your perfect quarter inch. But when you're doing a rip cut, what's really important is this face, the one that the saw blade is going to come in contact with the first. So we're going to make our quarter inch mark there. And then the same thing, when we align our teeth, we're going to find the tooth that comes in contact with that area first. And there we can see we're not quite adjusted. And now we can see our tooth is exactly taking that line. And then using of course a push stick, we would make that cut. And again, I'm going to lower the blade to show you that we're just hitting the line perfectly. So you can see here that we just hit our line perfectly. You can see it goes right there. If we put our marking knife in there, it lines up perfectly. So let's head over to the drill press. I'm going to show you how to drill holes accurately in plum. Okay. When it comes to being accurate while drilling, there's several tricks, but what is most important is using some sort of device to make a divot exactly where you want to drill. Now this is a scratch all and uses manpower to make a divot. And this is a center punch, which uses a spring loaded punch to make a divot. So you would just press it down and it makes a hole or with this one, you would just press it yourself. I tend to use the automatic center punches because they make a much bigger divot, which allows your drill bit to find where you need to drill. So what I like to do is when I'm drilling at the drill press, I'll use my calipers. And usually let's say, I think most times when I drilling, I'm drilling in the center of something. So what I would do is measure a piece and here we have, let's call it 1.46 for easy to vision. So that's 0.73 is the middle. So I'd get to 0.73 lock it in. And then I would just drag my calipers over where I want to do it. And I do it from both sides in case I'm slightly off. You'll find that when you go from both sides. And then I locate where I want to drill. I take my center punch. And because you did that line with your calipers, it's really easy to find it just like a marking knife line. And I would punch down maybe even a couple of times to leave a divot, or you could do it with your scratch. All you just find your hole press down. And what that allows is your drill press to your drill bit to find the hole. There's several types of drill bits. Obviously there's Brad point bits. There's, I don't really know the name of these cone bits. It just has an angled face. And then there's Forstner bits here, which have a point. And so let me show you how I get accurate holes using all of these. So with a drill press, what I like to do is if I'm drilling a singular hole, I'll start with the drill press off and I'll find my hole. And then I'll let go of the board and just kind of go up and down just a little bit. And I'll make sure I'm dead center. And then I'll hold firmly and start to drill. And then I know I'm right in my hole. Now let's say I was running and I'm going to move it slightly. So you can see right when I get to, I'm going to loosen my grip a little bit. And the drill bit is going to realign it and go right to that divot, wherever that may be. I'm going to go over here. We'll loosen my grip and it lines it. Then I hold it real tight and start to drill with a regular hand drill. And you want to make, you almost always want to do a 90 degree hole. What I like to do is I'll take the engineer's square that we talked about earlier and I'll lay it on my piece of wood. So we'll, we'll start just in our divot. I'll put my drill bit right in and I can find it while it's off. And then I'll use my square to make sure I'm visually looking that I'm nice and square and I'll drill down. And so that's how I drill accurate holes using either a drill press or a hand drill. So those are my tips and tricks that I find helped me be a lot more accurate in my woodworking, but I'd love to hear what you do. So please down in the comments, tell me your tricks and I'll include them in the next video. Thank you so much for watching you guys, please click the smash button, comment, do all that good stuff. Everything is read and appreciated. And thank you so much for your support. Have a wonderful day. Stay safe in the shop and I'll see you soon.