Woodworking Tricks You'll Actually Use // How Did I Not Know These Things

This video is sponsored by Policy Genius. Hey! In this video, I'm gonna invite you to see how much of a moron I am. Was. Still am. Anyways, when I first started out woodworking, I knew absolutely nothing. I cannot stress how little I knew. I was starting completely on my own, teaching myself as I went. Because of that, there was a lot of helpful tips and tricks that I didn't learn until much later on. So, I thought it might be a good idea to go back and share with you some of those tricks that I've learned along the way, that I wish I would have known at the very beginning. You might already know these. You might be watching and thinking, how the heck did that guy not know about that? That's common sense. Well, it wasn't common sense to me. So there's a chance it might help at least somebody out there. So watch the video, enjoy, and comment down below. There's no way I can fit everything that I learned along the way in this one video. So if there's something you want touched on, let me know and I'll try and do a video on it. Let's talk about the jointer. I hear this all the time. People are like, I have a jointer, but it's really old and the fence isn't square at all. So it doesn't even work to join boards. Wrong. You're just not running the boards through the jointer right. Let me show you what I mean. I purposely made this fence horribly out of square so I can show you how you can perfectly join boards even with a completely un-square fence. So out of square fence, perfectly joined boards. Here we go. This is what you're gonna want to do. All right, for demonstration purposes, I'll be using these two pieces of white oak. Now, before you ever run them through the jointer, what you're gonna want to do is take all your pieces, lay them out for your tabletop or whatever you're making, and you're gonna mark them. You're gonna mark A, B, A, B. Sorry, my handwriting is horrible. But you get the picture and you're gonna go all the way across. An A side, a B side, an A side, a B side. So they're all marked just like that. Handy-dandy. Next, first, you're gonna take your board and you're gonna run it through with the A side down facing out like this. Until you get a nice straight edge. It might not be square, but it's straight. Then you're gonna take your board and you're gonna go like this. So now the B side is on the bottom and facing towards the fence. Then you're gonna run that through. And that's gonna solve your problem. Don't believe me? Watch this. Okay, so here's our board fresh off the jointer. As you can see, these edges are crazy unsquare. But by running it through the way we did, what we've done is we've cut one angle on this side and then we cut the opposite of that angle on the other side. So if you run all your boards through in that pattern with the A, B, like I showed you and you get another one that is completely unsquare, even though it's unsquare, it'll still be perfectly flush up against your board because your jointer may be completely out of whack. But by running the boards through in that pattern, you're still gonna get a nice perfect joint. So, my jointer is perfectly square. I know it is because I check it all the time. But I still do it this way just to make sure and I always get perfect joints because that's how I roll. Well, it's really because of that trick I just showed you. Hope that helps. Another thing you want to watch out for when you're joining two boards together, and I talk about this all the time in my videos, so if you didn't pick up on it there, you should pay attention better, is alternating your growth pattern from board to board. As you can see in this one, it's kind of gonna curve around, follow the natural rings of the tree this way. And this one curves up instead of down, following the natural rings of the tree up. This one's going down. So you want to alternate those growth patterns every other board. So you got frown, and you got smile, and you got frown, and you got smile. Back and forth across all your boards. Now the reason you want to do this is because the board is naturally going to cup in the direction of those rings. So if all your boards are looped up like a bunch of frowns, then your tabletop is naturally going to go over time. Or the opposite, it's gonna go down over time. But by alternating those growth patterns, one might cup up, the other might cup down, up, down, up, down, and it's gonna even out your tabletop and keep it nice and level over, you know, the years of constant use. Pretty cool, huh? Last but not least, let's talk about actually gluing boards together. Okay, now you probably noticed in a lot of my videos, whenever I join boards together for a big tabletop or something, I'm not putting any biscuits or dominoes in there. The reason being is that it is a complete myth that biscuits or dominoes help with the actual strength of the table. A glued joint, a well-glued joint, is going to be stronger than the board itself. Meaning, if you try and break your tabletop, there's a far greater chance the table is going to break along one of the boards than it will along that seam. Now, why do people use biscuits and dominoes then? Well, either they're misinformed or what biscuits and dominoes do do, I said do do, what they do is they help with alignment. Meaning, they help you get the boards nice and flush together by locking them in place. Now, the reason I don't use them is because I spend a lot of time milling my lumber so that it's not hard to align those boards. Another thing you got to watch out for is clamping pressure. So many people put the clamps on and they tighten them as hard as they freaking can, like they're trying to squeeze orange juice out of a rock. You don't need to do that. If your boards are milled properly, just a little bit of clamping force is going to hook those boards together. The problem is, you start tightening the clamp on there on one side super tight, it's going to start to lift up the edges of your table and it's going to dry in that position. So you're going to start right off the bat with a table that's not flat. You don't want that. Now, if you have clamps that just have to be tightened super tight or they won't work or whatever, one thing that I will do is I'll lay all my boards out on a flat surface like my workbench and then I will clamp the edge of the two outside boards to the workbench so that as I put the clamps on there, if I over tighten, those outer edges can't lift up. The whole thing is going to stay perfectly flat. Now, a lot of people are like, well, doesn't that glue the tabletop to your workbench? Maybe to your workbench, but not to mine. Because I did the entire top of my workbench in a Formica laminate and the glue just pops right off. So yes, it sticks for a second, but I'm just like... And then it's off. So, Formica on the top of workbench, there's another good tip because glue doesn't want to stick to it. And if there's glue residue on it, I scrape it off with a putty knife. If you need a good workbench, I have plans available for mine on my website. I will link them in the video description below. Shameless plug. All right, enough about joining. Let's talk about cutting wood because you cut a lot of wood as a woodworker. The first thing I want to talk about is the jigsaw. Now, the jigsaw is something that I've probably been using since the beginning of my career because it was cheap and affordable and it's very handy. You can get in a lot of tight places. You can cut the interior of things. Let's talk about that for a second. Whenever I'd see people cutting the interior of something, like cutting a circle out for a sink to drop in, something like that, I'd always see them drill a hole to get the jigsaw started. Then they stick the blade in the hole, cut out their circle. Voila, you're done. But, did you know you can plunge cut with a jigsaw? Because I didn't when I first started out and when I learned about it, it saved me a lot of time because I didn't have to run and get the flipping drill. I just use the jigsaw, boom, and you're done. So this is what you're gonna do. Let's say you have a circle that you need to cut out. Just like that. Now, like I said, lots of people will drill a hole, stick the jigsaw in, and then cut out the circle. But there's no need. Now, you can't just plunge cut like this. Obviously, the jigsaw is gonna go all over the place. But, if you take the jigsaw and you tilt it like this, turn it on and slowly bring it down, you're actually gonna cut right into the piece and you don't need a drill. Let me show you. Now, yes, I do still need some practice on my jigsaw skills. But, as you can see, plunge cutting with the jigsaw works great. This is quarter-inch, but I've got up to one inch MDF. No problem. Hardwood? Yep, been there, done that. You want a nice sharp blade and you just want to slowly tilt it as you go in. And then you don't have to get out of the drill. How about that? My next tip is on staying motivated while you're in the woodshop. A lot of people say, Jason, how do you work so fast? How do you get so much stuff done? Well, here is my secret. Anytime I come into the woodshop to build a piece of furniture, I lie to myself. I tell myself, you're not building a piece of furniture. You're actually building a bomb shelter. Your bomb shelter. And if you don't build it fast enough, you're gonna die in a fiery explosion. It helps me work a lot faster because if I don't get it done, I'm gonna die. Our next helpful tip is brought to you by the sponsor for this video, Policy Genius. If you have a family, you need life, home, and auto insurance. It's as simple as that. So why is buying it so complicated? Policy Genius asked themselves the same question. Then they started a company and literally reinvented the process from start to finish. Policy Genius compares the top life insurance companies on the market to find you the right coverage at the absolute best price. But they're easy to use sites. You can save up to 40% just by comparing quotes. And because Policy Genius is an independent broker, you can be assured that they are fighting for you, the customer, not the insurance company. As the second largest term life insurance broker in the U.S., Policy Genius helps you shop over 40 insurers to find your best fit. 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The one problem is that sometimes when you go to start your cut and you're pulling it can be hard to get them started because you're starting on all those teeth and you can mar up the piece that you're cutting into or sometimes it can bounce off of the line that you're trying to cut on. So I was trying to come up with a good solution to make this easier and I found something that works pretty good. I don't even know if this is a real thing. I just kind of made it up one day, but it works great. So I thought I'd show you. Here's what you do. All right. Now what I'm about to do probably goes against everything that goes along with hand tools. But like I said, I don't know a lot about hand tools. So I'm just flying off the seat of my pants here. So what I do when I get these Japanese pole saws with the new blade is I go over to the grinder, I turn it on and I grind off about an inch of the teeth at the very bottom of the saw, like this. It only takes a second because it's a super thin blade. But what you're left with, I don't know if you can see that, is you have all the teeth and then you get this nice little flat portion right there at the bottom. That is key to starting your clean cut. Let me show you. Okay. Now as you can see, I've grinded off this one inch section here. Teeth used to go all the way down here. So anywhere you started this cut, you had to start on the teeth, which like I said, can bounce around a little bit, can mar things up. It's just not super easy. But by grinding off that one inch section, it gives me a smooth rest that I can start my cut on. So I start at the tip like that and then just pull down fast. And I dive right in there without all that bouncing around. Why they don't just add that onto the pull saw, I don't know. Maybe there's a saw out there that already has this. If there is, leave me a link in the comments. But if your saw doesn't have that on there, just grind off the teeth and it'll make starting cuts so much easier. Hey Let's talk about the miter saw. Now when I first got a miter saw, I'd never used one before. I just ordered it online because I read this blog and it said you need a miter saw. And a problem I was having was getting a lot of binding on my blade, getting the blade pinched when I was trying to cut down long pieces of stock. Because normally the stock would have a bow in it and as I would cut the piece, the bow would start to sink and it would pinch the blade. And I read a few things, couldn't really find anything that helped me out. But then my friend Matt over at MWA Woodworking showed me how he cuts his stock down to avoid that. And I've never had that problem again. And this is what he does. So what you're gonna do is instead of just trying to make one cut all the way through here, so the blade gets pinched as that board drops because it's bowed or whatever, we're gonna cut in the front of the board here just a little bit. We're gonna move, we're gonna cut the back of the board there and once those are both cut through, there's gonna be a little section left in the middle. Now, what happens here is that little section left in the middle usually isn't enough to just bind your blade. It reduces the surface area that can pinch onto your blade. So by doing it that way, you don't get any of that blade binding. Let me show you. Now you might have heard the change in the pitch of the saw on that final cut where it actually wanted to grab onto the blade because it was pinching a little bit. But because I removed the front and the back portion of the board first, that little tab I was cutting through wasn't enough material to actually grab onto my blade. So if you cut your bigger boards this way, you're not gonna get any of that blade binding. It literally has removed that problem from my whole problems list completely. So, good to know. Hey, let's talk about routers for a second, okay? When I first started woodworking, I knew nothing about routers. True story. I knew that people used routers. I literally did not know how they worked. They scared me. And so finally I was like, I want to be a good woodworker. So I bought a router and then I had to learn how to use it. Now my first question when it came to routers is how do you know what direction to push the router? Because that matters when it comes to the direction the blade's spinning and all that. But it got confusing whether you're doing the outside of a table or the inside of the table or inside of a little cutout. And I was like, I don't know. How do you always know which way to push the router? Well, my friend Sedge over at Festool showed me a really awesome trick that I use still today and it works great. And that was just to take your right hand with your thumb. You put your thumb against the piece, the edge that you're gonna route on, and whichever direction your finger is pointing, that is the way that you're always going to push the router. Now that seems ridiculously simple, but outside it works, inside it works, upside down it works, right side up it works. Doesn't matter. Whichever way your finger is pointing with your right hand when your thumb is against that edge, that's the direction you're gonna push a router. As he says, I hope that helps. All right. Second thing with routers that I was always diddling around with, especially with a plunge router, is how to determine the depth I wanted to plunge. Now what I used to do is I'd flip it upside down like this, I'd push the plunge down, and with a tape measure, I'd measure the distance from the router plate to the top of the blade to determine my depth. This works, but it's not super accurate. So then I was like, oh, I'm gonna take it up a notch. And I got some of these fancy setup blocks in all different sizes. Then I'd take the setup block, set it on there, and I'd make sure that the blade was perfectly flush with the setup block. Seems like a great solution, right? Well, it's not the best way to do it. Then some genius showed me that what you can do is flip your router the right side up like this, push it all the way down until it makes contact with the surface that it's on. So it's perfectly flat against there. Then you got this little stop gauge right here, right? Got the stop and that comes down and it hits a pin. Well, you raise that stop up, you take your setup block, whatever size you want, stick it in there, and wedge it in between your stop and that little pin. Lock it down. Take out your setup block, and you know, because you have, this is a quarter inch, a quarter inch gap between that stop and that pin, that when you actually plunge it into your piece, it's gonna go exactly a quarter of an inch. You don't gotta fuss around by flipping it upside down and all that jazz. Now, you might be saying to yourself, well, I don't have any fancy setup blocks and frankly, I've looked online and they're ridiculously expensive. Some of them are like 150 bucks for a nice set of these. Well, I've got a cheap, affordable solution for under $15 and you can do the exact same thing. I know, watch this. Okay, here is a fancy set of setup blocks. These are from Woodpeckers Tools. Unfortunately, these are one of their one-time tools and so I don't even think you can get these anymore. But there's a bunch of other ones out there. These are aluminum and they're really nice. They're always gonna be perfect. You don't have to worry about it. But I think they were well over 100, $150 and let's say you don't want to spend that much money. Let's say you're on a budget. Well, if you go down to Home Depot or Lowe's or any big-box store and you go in the back by the trim, there's the dowel section. They have all the round dowels and you can get them in different sizes. Well right next to the round dowels, they also have square stock. Also milled down to precise dimensions. They got one inch. They got three-quarters. They got five-eighths. They got half-inch. They got three-eighths. They got one-quarter. They go all the way up to like three inches, I think. Anyways, you buy a bunch of these and you cut them smaller and you have yourself a very affordable set of setup blocks. For all these, it was like $12.87. Now, they're wood. They're not metal. So after a while, they're gonna get dinged up and banged and they're not gonna be as accurate. But I have enough here. I can make about six sets of these things. And so when one wears out, I just cut a few more. I have a whole new set. You can also get them in hardwood. These are just pine, but they make them in oak too if you want to get a little fancier and spend like $25. But it's a great solution to have setup blocks around. I use them all the flipping time and you don't have to break the bank. What do you think of that? I also tested these against my woodpeckers ones and they're literally exactly the same size. All right. The last thing I'm gonna talk about when it comes to routers is speed. Most routers you buy nowadays are what they call variable speed routers, which means they got a little adjustment on them. This one's right here where you can change the speed of the router slower to faster. Now being a newbie, not knowing anything about routers, I had no clue when I was and wasn't supposed to decrease and increase the speed of a router. So I did some research early on to figure out what I'm supposed to do. And this is what I came up with. The short answer. When you're using a bigger bit, you want to slow down the speed. When you're using a smaller bit, you want a faster speed. But you might be saying, like I was, Why? I want to know why. Don't worry. I'm gonna tell you. Step in to the classroom. All right. Now, router speed is determined on a measurement system called RPM, which stands for Rotations Per Minute. And that refers to how many times it is making the shank of your router bit spin around in one minute. So just to use some nice even numbers, let's say you have your router set on 20,000 RPMs. That means that the shank is going to make a full rotation 20,000 times in one minute. Now, here's where the different sizes come in. If you use a small bit like this on 20,000 RPMs, it's gonna spin around 20,000 times. If you use a big bit like this on 20,000 RPMs, it's gonna spin around 20,000 times. However, this big bit on the circumference, outside edge of the bit, is gonna be moving much faster at 20,000 RPMs than the small bit. Let me show you why. Imagine this is your small router bit, and this is your big router bit. Now, for this to spin around completely 20,000 times in one minute, it's got to travel a certain amount of speed. Because if you stretch this out into a straight line, it's the time it takes to go from point A to point B in one minute. Now, this is a shorter distance with a smaller router bit. But if you have a big router bit like this, with a bigger circumference around the perimeter, and you stretch that out into a straight line, it's a much longer line. So to go from point A to point B, it's got to be traveling faster in order to get 20,000 rotations in in that one minute. So, the bigger the bit you get, the faster it's gonna be spinning. They're both gonna be going 20,000 RPMs. But, this one's gonna be going like a hundred miles an hour, where at the outside edge of this, the rim speed, it's gonna be going like 200 miles an hour. And when we're using a giant bit like this, you don't want it going 200 miles an hour. That's just flipping crazy. So, when you're using a bigger bit, you want to slow down that RPM, so it's traveling at a slower rate of speed compared to a little bit, litter, no, little bit. You want it to be at a faster RPM, so it maintains a faster speed. The goal is to get all your bits traveling roughly at the same speed by adjusting that RPM, depending on the size of your bit. I never knew! I could talk about routers all day, because there's a zillion things that I didn't know about routers that I learned. But, let's move on to something else, shall we? Sometimes, I'm in the shop, and I really want to drink something, but maybe I have an appointment later with a client, and I don't want to get my beard and mustache all messy. So, I found a solution to get around this, and still be able to stay hydrated. What I do is, I take a tape measure, make it roughly nine inches long, and put it in a rack like this, and then you just pour it clean. All right, that was literally the tiniest fraction of things that I've had to learn over the years, most of them the hard way. So, if that was helpful, please comment in the video description down below, let me know, and I'll do more videos like this. Also, if there's something specific that you want to know about, let me know in the comments. And don't forget to subscribe, hit that little bell, so you're notified of when I do another video like this. All right! Let's go! Don't feel like that was the best outro video I've ever done.