Woodworking Tricks You'll Actually Use || Helpful Woodworking Hints

Hey! Welcome to another video. This week I'm doing something you guys have been asking for. You've been saying, hey Jason, when are you going to do another tips and tricks video? That's right, some helpful woodworking tips and tricks that you may or may not know. So follow along, watch the video, check them out, you might learn something. Or you might think, duh, I already knew that. But that's okay. We still should have a good time. So let's do it. All right, we're going to talk about the jigsaw. This is something I haven't talked a lot about in the tips and tricks video, so I thought, hey, I'll give you a few jigsaw tips. Now I try not to use the jigsaw as much as possible because, well, it doesn't give a super clean cut, it can be a little wonky, and if you can do it straight and nice and easy, well, find another way to do it. But there comes times where you have to use a jigsaw because you got to do some weird curve, freehand. Anyways, there's a right way and a wrong way to use a jigsaw. First, I'm going to talk about getting a nice, crisp cut. Now you might notice when you use a jigsaw, it always upcuts, right? So you get a nice, clean cut on the bottom of your board, and the top's usually all blown out, a bunch of chip out, and it looks terrible. So there's two things you can do here. Either one, flip your piece over so that your visible side's on the bottom, so that's your nice, clean cut. But then you got to mark everything on the bottom and know where you're going to cut. There is a second option. Now I actually got this tip from my friend Michael Alm. You should go check out his YouTube page, Alm Fab, I think it's what it's called. Anyways, my tool fell out when I rolled off the desk. Where'd it go? Two hours later, I found it! Alright, so what Mike taught me, which is so simple and makes so much sense, is that if you know the line you're going to cut with your jigsaw, you just take an X-Acto knife. Now it's a lot easier if it's a straight line like this, which I'm doing for demonstration purposes, but you can do it freehand if it's a big curved line. I'm just going to line this straight edge up right on the edge of my line, and then you're just going to take your X-Acto knife, and you're going to score that line. Just like this. Now whenever you're scoring a line, I've mentioned this in other tips and tricks videos, your first pass you want to be nice and light, and then you increase the pressure as you go. If you start with full pressure right off the bat, your X-Acto knife's going to follow the wood grain, and you're not going to get a straight line. So start light, and then do a couple more passes, getting heavier on each one, and you'll get a nice straight line. Now what we've done here is we've actually pre-sliced into all the wood fibers on the top of the board. That way, when we go to make our cut with the jigsaw, we can follow that line, and if we stay just on the outside of that score line, we're not going to get all that chip out because we've already broken all those fibers previously. I'll show you what I mean. Come here. Just look really close. Darn it. Wait, let me move the camera, and then I'll be back in a second. Hold on. All right, so as you can see, here's the first demonstration cut I did for you with no scored line, and you got all this nasty chip out. It's kind of clean on this side, but your finished piece looks horrible. Then here is the line that I pre-scored. You can see there's a little bit of chip out on this side that wasn't next to that scored line, but our scored line, it's a little fuzzy, but dang, does that not look so much better than the alternative? So if you have to freehand cut with the jigsaw, just score that line first, and you're going to get a way crisper, cleaner edge. I'm going to give you two more tips about the jigsaw, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but one problem with the jigsaw, especially if you're doing thicker stock, is that it's really hard to get a perfectly flush, square cut, because this blade can be a little flimsy. And the problem is, as you start cutting, that blade deflects sideways. So you might be perfect on the top of the piece, but then it's going to slope out as you cut through your piece. So there's a couple things you can do to avoid this. First of all, make sure you have the right blade in the jigsaw. This usually happens when you have a blade that is way too long, so you're going way farther through the piece than you need to. The longer the blade, the more deflection is going to happen as you cut the piece, and you're going to wind up with that angle. You also want to make sure you're not putting any unnecessary pressure one way or the other, because obviously if you put pressure this way, it's going to tilt that blade angle, and you're going to get that slope. But what do you do if that happens, and you've already cut the piece, and you got that slope on there, and you want it to be perfectly flush, and it's not? Do you try and sand it? Well, you could, but you might get even worse results from that. But there is a little trick that you can do to fix this problem, and I'm going to show you right now. But first, I'm going to attempt to cut that angle. So as you watch me do this, I'm trying to cut an angle, so don't judge me too much. All right, so I cut this board down so it's a little smaller, so I'm not dealing with this huge thing. But as you can see, this is a little exaggerated, but because our jigsaw had some blade deflection, we got this nice angle going on. It looks pretty perfect from the top. You might have followed that line like a woodworking ninja, but because of the blade deflection, it's not a square cut. So is this a lost cause? Do we just chuck it away and try again? No, there's actually a way that you can fix this and get it pretty back to perfectly square without much effort, and I'm going to do it for you right now. We just need a few things first. So I mentioned your line might be perfect on the top, but then it's got that deflection towards the bottom. But because it's pretty darn perfect on the top, which this is now the top and this is the bottom because I flipped it over just so you're not confused, because it's pretty perfect on the top, we can use that as basically a template to cut the rest of our piece to that and just replicate it. And we're going to do that using a bottom mounted flush cut router bit just in the trim router. So you're going to set this as far down as you can go and still be on your stock. So basically you're as close to that perfect line as you can get. Then we're just going to plop it on here, use that perfect line as our template, zip zap zoop, and the whole thing should be flush again. I'll show you right now. All right, so we essentially just used our existing piece as a router template, and now check out them apples. Same exact line we cut with our jigsaw, but now it is pretty darn perfectly flush. We can just hit that with a little bit of sandpaper by hand. Problem solved, crisis averted. Sorry Craig. And it's on to the next trick. Now if you know anything about me, it's that I like a good glass of bourbon now and then. All right, more than now and then. I like a good glass of bourbon it seems like all the time, especially while I'm sanding wood. But I've noticed that as I get older, those pointless calories start winding up right down here. And I've been trying to think of some way that I can kind of regulate how much bourbon I'm drinking on a daily basis. And that's when I came up with a great little trick that I wanted to share with you. Two words, robot butler. That's right, I invented a robot butler that just roams around the shop carrying bourbon in a glass. But here's the catch, I'm only allowed to drink it when it actually brings it to me. And unfortunately, that's not very often. Now another tip that I've shared in past tips and tricks videos is how you can just take sawdust and mix it with wood glue and you can make your own wood filler. This comes in real handy when you're working with a specific species and you can't find a wood filler to match if you've got to fill little cracks or voids or nail holes. The one problem with this method is all of us have sawdust that looks like this in the wood shop, these big chunks. But in order to make your own wood filler mixed with glue, you really need a really fine dusty sawdust. So you have a couple options. You can hook a bag up to a palm sander, sand something for a while, and then try and cut open the bag and empty it out and get fine dust. That way you use like an oscillating belt sander and just sand, sand, sand, and try and collect the dust. But none of these methods produce a large quantity of dust very quickly. But I've got a little tip that'll get you as much dust as you want super fast and it'll only cost you about a one-time investment of $15. And this is what you do. You go to the store and you buy a coffee grinder. It doesn't matter what brand, anything will work. You grab your sawdust of choice, you sprinkle it in there like your favorite coffee roast, pack it up in there good, plop on your lid, and voila. All right, now in just a few seconds we've gone from this to this beautiful fine powder which is perfect for making our wood fillers. Then all we got to do, take some of that, sprinkle it on there, take our wood glue, squirt a bunch on there like a lot. Or as I mentioned in another video, you could use whatever finish you're using. If you're using polyurethane or a lacquer or a varnish, just mix some of that in here with it and then it won't mess up your finish. And now you've got a nice pasty wood filler that's going to be the exact same color as whatever wood you're working with. And here's the cool thing. I will just do this from time to time, store up a bunch of this dust, and then I get online and I order these little plastic jars, and you can just fill them up with a bunch of different wood species so you have them on hand when you need them. I think this one's got some, yeah, walnut in there. And you just grab a pinch, make some wood filler, whatever wood you're using, and you're good to go. And it's much faster than trying to collect just the fine dust off your floor. So hopefully that helps you out. Now go buy a coffee grinder. I love meat. That's right, I love it. 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Dang, that's a good steak. So making this fine sawdust and doing your own wood filler is great when you need a larger quantity. Maybe you're doing a bunch of little pinholes or something like that and you want a lot of it. But what if you just need a little bit and you don't want to take the time to do this whole shin dig? Well there's a little trick that I use all the time. Pretty much whenever there's a tiny crack in a piece of wood, it's not compromising the integrity of the piece, but it's there. And I just want to fill that little crack and keep moving on. So here's what you can do. Just take a little glue straight out of the bottle and you're just going to fill up that crack with glue as best you can. Just squirt it on there and then I like to use my finger to kind of work it down into that crack as much as possible. Then all you got to do is take your sander, make sure that if you have dust extraction you disconnect the dust extraction or turn it off. You want a lot of dust for this process. Then we're just going to sand directly over this glue and because the dust extraction is not on, what's going to happen is instantaneous, all that dust is going to mix with the glue, make a wood filler right under our sander, fill the crack, and you're good to go. Now if you've watched any of my videos in the past you've probably seen me use setup blocks to set the blade height on my table saw. If I'm going to do a little slot or for whatever reason. There is one problem with using setup blocks to set your blade height, and that is sometimes it's hard to find the dead center of your blade because it's at the dead center that your blade is going to be the highest. So what I've done in the past, I haven't done it on this side yet because this is a brand new saw from Harbor Freight, but on my other saws I mark a line on my insert or even on the table saw itself that is dead center in the middle of my arbor because that's going to be the tallest point of my blade. That way when you're using a setup block you can put it right on that mark and make sure that that's the distance you're measuring because if you're off a little bit to the left or right it's not going to be an accurate measurement. But the question is, how do you find the dead center? Sure you could pull out your insert and try and eyeball it off of your arbor, but it's not going to be super accurate. So I'm going to show you a way that you can find exactly the dead center of this blade, get it marked, and make setting it up with a setup block or gauge, whatever, so much easier. So here's what you're going to want to do. So our task to figure out dead center of this blade. Now if you look in your instruction manual on a lot of saws it'll give you a measurement from the factory front of your saw to where that dead center is, but I don't trust it. You're changing out your blade, things are moving around, I think the only way to get an accurate interpretation of where that center is is to actually cut something and see where it lands. So here's what you're going to want to do. Just get a scrap piece of ply and I just use these Rockler sacrificial fence clamps, quick fence clamps, I don't know what they're called but I'll put a link in the video description. You clamp those onto your fence like so. Then if you have a riving knife on your table saw make sure you remove that so it doesn't get in the way and lower your table saw blade all the way down below your insert. Then we're going to slide the fence over so that that sacrificial fence is just covering that blade leaving it just a little proud so we can see the blade actually make the cut. Next we're just going to slowly, and I mean slowly, raise this blade up until it just pokes out the top of the sacrificial fence. That's going to give us dead center, top height of that blade, and then I'll show you how to transfer that mark from the fence accurately onto your actual table saw. So let's see what happens. All right now it's a little hard to see in the video but I can tell because I stopped it right when it came to through that the top of the blade is right here on this piece of plywood and that is probably within a 64th of an inch on either side. I mean it's pretty darn close because you saw I just barely was cranking it up. So mark exactly where that point is on this piece of plywood. Now before we do anything else what you're going to want to do, this is clamped securely, we want to mark where the sacrificial fence lands on our actual table saw fence. So you're just going to take a pencil draw a little line right on your fence there, and you're going to draw another line right here on this side. Once that's done we can lower our blade back down, get it out of the way, all the way below the insert here. Then we're just going to pop these quick clamps out of this piece of plywood like so, pull our fence back, and then fold it down making sure that it's still on those lines that we just marked. Then we're going to slide that over right next to the slot on our insert and just using a square to make sure that it's accurate we're going to transfer a line onto our insert. Now there's a chance with the wear from putting boards across this insert that is actually going to get worn down and that line is going to go away so you could use permanent marker that would work. What I like to do is actually score a line onto my tabletop surface itself because that's always going to be there. So for that just take a knife or an exacto knife anything like that and you're just going to score a line. Yes it'll permanently mar your tabletop but it'll be super helpful to know exactly dead center of that blade. So next time you need to set your blade height and you've got your gauge out you can make sure that you put it right over that mark, raise your blade, and get it perfect. Hope that helps. If you got a toilet in your wood shop it can get pretty gross. All the sawdust lands in there and who knows what's going on on this thing. I mean the taco truck is right down the street and I hate cleaning the toilet but I found a nice little trick on how you'll never have to clean the toilet again. All you got to do is get a little tool called the kreg jig. That's right a kreg jig to clean a toilet. Let me show you how it works. Um kreg um I need you to clean the toilet buddy. I'm always looking for a way that I can either upgrade or modify my tools to make them work even better than they already do. And that brings me to my next tip which is a little clamping hack that I came up with a while ago. Now some of you might have these old school pony style clamps with the wood handles. The clamps work great. The one downside is that from an ergonomic standpoint it's hard to get enough grip on this wood handle because it's slippery. So when you really need to clamp something down it can be kind of tricky. Now the newer style clamps they've come out with are these rubber gripped ones for that exact reason and they're a lot easier to twist. But you don't have to get rid of these old wood ones. I've made a simple modification to these clamps and I'm actually reaching for these more often than the new ones now because I can get more clamping force than I could before. All you got to do is take your drill or put it on the drill press and drill out a nice little hole in the end of the clamp there. Then just go down to Home Depot and buy a bolt. Stick it in there, thread it in with a little of epoxy so that it can go in but it cannot come back out. Let the epoxy cure up so that thing is locked in there. Then the really cool part is you just get a driver with the right size socket attachment and you don't have to twist it with your hands anymore. So if you really need to clamp that sucker down there good you just plop it on, get out your driver, and clamp to your little heart's content. And I guarantee you're going to get it way tighter with this than you can with your own hand. And these are now better than the new ones! And you can get them for pretty cheap online. Check Craigslist. Now as you might have noticed in videos lately, I recently hired an employee to help me around the shop. And employees are no joke. You got to keep them on their toes. You always got to keep them thinking. And the best way I found to do this is, well, just to scare the crap out of them from time to time, by doing things like this. Now this next one's a pretty well-known trick but I'm always surprised when I do tricks that I think you guys have probably heard of before. There's a ton of people that say, wow I never knew, so I thought I'd throw this one out there anyways. And that's how to remove minor dents from a piece of hardwood or plywood. Now first we got to make a dent. So I'm just going to take this hammer and this beautiful piece of walnut and... that didn't even make a dent. Let's try a little harder. There we go! A nice little dent from the hammer right in the wood. Now wood is made of a bunch of little fibers, so when you dent a piece you're just kind of pushing those fibers in closer together. It doesn't mean that all is lost. There's actually a way that you can remove this dent, if not all of it, most of it. And all you're going to need is a wet paper towel and any household iron. I mean we already used a coffee grinder, might as well use an iron too. So you're just going to place your paper towel over the dent and iron it out, just like you would a wrinkle from your favorite shirt. Let's see if it works. Now I'm not going to lie and try and tell you that it's disappeared completely because a lot of times it won't, but what this will do is reduce the dent by a good amount. I mean that's probably 90% less than what it was, and I just barely hit it with a little sandpaper. I come over this with a power sander and it's going to disappear 100%. So if you accidentally ding a workpiece, don't worry about it, just try and iron it out. There are dents that this is not going to help if they break through those fibers and actually cut them, but just a dent usually will pop right out with a little heat and a little water. Ouch. Well there you have it, another tips and tricks video. Hopefully you enjoyed that and you learned something. If you're not already and you want to support the channel in just another way, help us out. Click right... it's one of those two. I forget because I'm backwards from what you guys are seeing, but there's a Patreon link. Go over to Patreon, there's live question and answer sessions, behind the scenes footage, coupon code to the website, and it would be a huge thanks from us to you if you want to do that. Also check the video description for product links, link to my website where you can get some merch, all that. Until next time, I'm gonna limp because my knee and that flippin' stool.