Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2021 i Popular Woodworking

While I love designing and building new things out of wood, one of the most valuable skills I’ve picked up along the way is being able to take care of and repair furniture and woodwork. Our kitchen opens up onto a small back porch. When we moved in, the door leading out to the porch was a standard home center steel insulated exterior door, installed backwards with the metal sill pointing into the kitchen. Not only did it not fit with the house, it was just ugly. It was a reminder of good intentions (insulated and weather-sealed) gone wrong. After spending the better part of my last two years remodeling the kitchen, building cabinetry, installing floors and trim, the door really needed to go. We found a great interior door…

T-track is a versatile product that has many great uses around the shop. It can be attached to the fence of a chop saw, drill press or router table to provide a quick, secure place to attach feather boards, stops and hold-downs. It also makes a great addition to jigs and fixtures with parts that need to be adjustable or easily removed. At first glance, all T-tracks look pretty much the same. There are, however, several subtle but important differences among brands. Sizes and Prices T-track is available in lengths from 1 ft. to 12 ft. and averages about $4.50 per lineal foot. It is usually sold in 1-or 2-ft. increments, but some brands can be special ordered to a specific length. Most T-tracks are approximately ¾" wide with a…

Power carving gets messy fast. There are chips and dust flying everywhere. Plus, you have the vibration of the angle grinder that you could be holding for hours. Oh, and let’s not forget the sound of the grinder. There is quite a bit of safety gear that I put on before I can get started with a carving project. Safety glasses, dust mask, fingerless gloves and hearing protect are on no matter which carving tool I am working with. I know that a good amount of people sees work gloves as a potential risk for injury when working with power tools. I would totally agree if they are full gloves. That leaves potential for loose fabric being near a spinning tool, and that is when disaster can strike. However, I…

Nothing slices, chops or pares through wood like a freshly sharpened chisel, but sharp edges don’t last forever. Frequent sharpening is a must, particularly for tools that are subjected to punishing tasks like chopping and aggressive paring, as in the preparation of dovetails. Ideally, we’d all like to be able to produce long-lasting, super-sharp edges quickly and easily. Now we can. On the WoodCentral.com Hand Tools forum, several members have been developing and refining a sharpening technique that David Weaver, the originator, has since nicknamed “Unicorning,” since the odds of his discovering a superior and nearly effortless technique seemed about as likely as stumbling upon a Unicorn, a mythical creature symbolic of things that are too good to be true. The name has stuck. By selectively buffing just the very…

Auxiliary Fence Scale I have difficulty making accurate measurements when I install my auxiliary fence, because its plywood is a weird thickness. My solution is to create a new scale based on the plywood. Zero the fence next to the blade and slide a thin ruler under the plastic curser. The ruler must rest under the curser without touching. Also, make sure the ruler is accurately scaled—inexpensive rulers may be inaccurate. Once the curser line is aligned with the ruler’s zero mark, tape the ruler in place.—Rich Flynn Router Wrench Grips I own several routers and they all have thin wrenches that are awkward to hold. To avoid frustration, I made the handles thicker by housing them in transparent plastic tubing from the hardware store. To keep the tubing in…

I was about to make a desk for my son John’s bedroom and in my mind it was a beautiful thing: simple, sleek and with elegant proportions. Drawings and a cut list were completed. Walnut boards were purchased and transported to Cerritos College in Norwalk, California where I am a community-ed student on Sundays. There should have been a plan of procedure, but since I had made a vaguely similar desk two years earlier, I thought I could safely wing it. That was my first unwitting mistake. Like you, I begin my projects with hope. Of course we expect problems along the way because that is the nature of woodworking, but at this point we’re not certain what those problems will be. Yet not long after I started working on…

No Flip Jointer/Planer Wood-Mizer has started developing standalone woodworking machinery. This combo jointer/planer caught our eye because it does both operations without flipping the jointer beds up or otherwise adjusting the machine between operations. The machine has a 9"-wide jointing capacity and 16" -wide planing capacity—impressive for the footprint. And, a dust collection port is routed behind the machine (and also doesn't need to move during switchover). The other interesting feature is the variable planing feed rate (available as on upgrade on the 3-phase model), from 6-39 fpm. It packs a lot of features into the compact 56" x 32" footprint, and is definitely worth exploring if you're space-challenged but want an industrial-level machine. Unplugged Maker Kit Battery technology comes to a few of the craftier tools in a woodworker’s…

No brush marks, drips, runs, bubbles, hairs, dust or orange peel—and beautiful results every time. For most furniture projects, it doesn’t get easier than using a wipeon/rub-off finishing process. This two-step method eliminates all the usual problems because rubbing off all of the finish that isn’t absorbed by the wood leaves no wet film in which the problems can occur. The clear and important difference between this method and all others (including wiping on and leaving a film build) is the rubbing off. No attempt is made to build a film on the surface of the wood. Rubbing off the source of all the problems is the big trick. The wipe-on/rub-off method avoids time spent cleaning brushes and it dramatically reduces or eliminates sanding between coats. There are some limitations,…