I work with about two dozen very engaged and friendly folks at my office.  They are great colleagues and friends I can rely on when the chips are down.

So, when one of my friends at work told me that she and her daughters were helping to put on a carnival to raise money to benefit cancer research and that they needed help making a bean bag toss (aka ‘Cornhole’ game), well, I knew I had to lend a hand.

Basically, they needed to cut a few holes in plywood to serve as a game board for players to toss bean bags through.  They want to paint the piece to make it look like a speaker, with a woofer, mid range and tweeter cones. They were able to get the home mega-center to cut a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of ply for the board, but they weren’t about to cut circles in it.

I knew that I had to do this job with a router and a jig to make perfectly smooth circles.  It was a piece of cake.

First thing I had to do was dig out a scrap of plywood from my scrap pile.  I found a piece of 1/4″ luan that was about two feet long and six inches wide. I took the baseplate off my DeWalt plunge router and used it as a template to mark out for the screw holes and the bit clearance hole.  I also scribed a line down the middle of the jig, so I could do some measuring later.

The next step was to cut the jig shape down a little bit to reduce the size. Was this step necessary?  Maybe not. But, it make the jig look really cool. Plus, it clipped the corners, so there was no way I was going to scratch myself.

After drilling the holes for the baseplate and attaching it to the router, I started working on the piece of plywood. I had marked a center line along the length of the board and measured out for the diameters.  This is a very easy step… basically, I spaced out the centers for the holes I wanted to cut and measured up the radius on both sides of the center point, giving me a good idea of where everything would land, and that I had enough room to swing all three circles.

The next step was pretty easy as well.  I drilled the center point for each of the circles with a 1/4″ diameter bit.  I went through the plywood and slightly into the particleboard base I was routing on.  Again, because I was using a regular 1/4″ dowel, and I didn’t want to go into the bench top, I went very slightly into the backer board.  This way, the center wouldn’t shift once it was cut free from the board.

On the jig, I drilled three pivot holes to fit the dowel at four, five and six inches from where the bit edge.  From there, I installed a 3/8″ up spiral bit into the plunge router and set the jig in place.  Sure, it was kind of long for this smaller application, but if I ever have to cut a larger hole, I’d have the room.

I set the bit plunge depth until it would just push through the board when fully at depth, and I knew I was going to have to do this in two or three passes so I wouldn’t burn the bit up.  Next, I popped the router and jig on the board, hit the on switch and let ‘er rip.  While you are spinning the router around, you have got to keep an eye on your power cable.  With two or three passes, you can easily get tangled up with the cord.  That’s not good.

After three passes, the circle was ready to pop out.  I’d say the result was pretty darned cool.  It was a perfectly round cut with pretty darned smooth edges.  There was a little splintering, but nothing a few passes with a sheet of sandpaper couldn’t handle.

After repeating the procedure for the other two circles, here’s the finished project.  Sure, the holes are a little large, but remember, kids are throwing the bean bags, so it should be a little easier.  Now, my co worker and her daughters just need to paint, and this one will be ready for the bean bags.

One of the things I enjoy most about woodworking is jointing and planing boards.  Think about it – you start with this rough, dull board that looks like something you wouldn’t put into a home construction project. When you are done, you have a gorgeous board you can build a masterpiece with.

Since I face and edge joint boards with a hand plane, the process is also a voyage of discovery. I can feel how that  rough outer layer peels  leaving a silky smooth surface behind.

But, sometimes, there are those boards that don’t behave well. Ironically, those are usually the boards that are the most beautiful, full of figure and character. This describes a board that was recently sent to me by Bell Forest Products.  I was looking for a live edge slab, and the one they sent to me was beautiful – a slab of flame birch.

Now, flame birch is one heck of a board.  Beautiful waving grain. Its beauty, alas, comes at a price. It’s one bear to surface.

Even with my super cool, heavy duty Veritas bevel up smoother set to a very fine cut, it still tore out like nobody’s business. Running the board through the planer – even with the finest cut – led to much more ugly tear out.

I thought I may have had to run down to the local hardwood supplier to get the board run through their wide belt sander, but they were closed the day I was free. Bummer.  Thinking that I was completely out of luck, I went home and sat down for a glass of iced tea.

That’s when it hit me.  Why not make a thickness jig for my router? Without looking at a plan, I grabbed some plywood scraps from the kitchen cabinet pull outs and puzzled it out on my own.

The whole jig involves two pieces of plywood nailed to two cross pieces. The two pieces that go across the board are held 3/4″ apart, just wide enough for a router bushing to fit between. This way, the movement of the router could be carefully controlled while I pushed the board under it.  Under the cross pieces, I took some of the slab offcuts and used them as spacers.

I put a 1/2″ bit into the router and set the base up with a 3/4″ router bushing. I set the depth of cut until it just grazed the top of the board and then turned the router on.

Feeding the board from left to right, I cut row after row across the board.  The tear out disappeared and the board ended up good and flat. What came out the other side was a board with some very fine router tracks, which were easily erased by a random orbit sander and some 100 grit sandpaper.

I would show you the final project, but I’m still building it and don’t want to spoil the surprise. However, when the boards are wild and unruly, now I know the secret of how to tame them in my shop.

When you add the prefix ‘re-’ to a word, sometimes it makes that word a whole lot less enjoyable.

Reheating a good dinner usually leaves it not as tasty as it did the first time around. When my boss asks me to reissue a press release, it’s probably because none of the local media has picked up on the story.  And, when my wife asks to review how much I have spent on woodworking tools… well… err…

But, when it comes to resawing, that’s usually a good thing. This past weekend, I was working with some thick chunks of ash and sapele which, while nice at nearly two inches in thickness, were just too thick for what I needed to do.  Rather than just throw them into the thickness planer and turn beautiful wood into sawdust, I decided to resaw them down to size.

Resawing is exactly what it sounds like – taking a board that was already sawn to a particular size, then sawing it down again to make a thinner board. I’m working with my regular tools… my table saw, band saw, hand planes and thickness planer.

My first move was to plane the rough boards smooth, flat and square. I ended up with boards that were about 5 inches wide and nearly 1 3/4″ thick.  It’s important that the edges are flat and square… you’ll be pushing your boards through and need them to sit flat on the table so you can saw safely.

I start at the table saw. If I had a more capable band saw, I would have started there, but my Delta band saw isn’t great with resawing through thick boards. And, both ash and sapele are tough stuff.  To be successful, I’m going to have to stack the deck in my favor.  I measured the width I want to cut the boards – in the case of the ash, 3/8″, and set the blade height about 2 inches above the table. I have to remove the guard and the splitter to do this, so on goes the featherboard to hold the saw in, and I use a push stick to hold the board flat to the table. I push the board through, flip it end for end, then turn the board over and repeat the process.  This way, I have two deep kerfs on each side.  They line up and provide a channel for the band saw blade to run down as I saw.

Once that’s done, I move to my band saw.  One of these days, I really do have to upgrade this sucker…

I set the blade guard up so it clears the height of the board by 1/4″ – I want to keep the upper blade guards as close to the wood as possible to help guide the blade.  Once the blade it tensioned properly (I’m using a 1/2″ blade, by the way), I push the board through.  My anemic little saw gagged and sputtered through the cut, but managed to split the boards out. I don’t use a fence using this method – I just push the board through and keep the blade centered in the larger table saw blade kerf.  Works fine for what I’m doing.

Now, I have the thinner boards with a strip of bandsawn wood in the middle.  I snug them in a vise and flatten them out with my bevel up jointer.  Then, once the majority of excess wood is off, I run the cut side through the thickness planer until I get exactly the thickness I need. No fuss, no muss, and a whole lot less waste.

What am I building?  Oh, you’ll see in due time…

For right now, it’s good enough to say that this piece will be in the next art contest at my place of employment.

Stay tuned for more.

Even though many people laugh when I say it, I really do like music from the 1970s.  For a kid coming of age during the 1980s, this is a huge leap, as many of my friends referred to the 1970s as an error instead of an era.

Sure, there were no Beatles, but the individual members were cranking out some good music. The Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin had moved from their deep 1960′s music into a snappier sound. Funk was really coming into its own and – yes – I’ve discovered that disco revolves around frenetic bass grooves. Which I’m trying to learn.  But my blasted fingers are still too fat to hit all of the notes.

One of the acts from that era I have come to appreciate is Rod Stewart. Yes, at the time, he was Rod the Bod who made the ladies swoon, but, as time has passed, I’ve come to appreciate the way he composed his music and  soulful lyrics.  The album that put him on the map as an artist was his 1971 work Every Picture Tells a Story. The offerings ran the gamut from a re recording of Elvis Presley’s That’s Alright Mama to the lyrical Maggie May. My favorite song on the album is the rocking title track, Every Stick it Tells a Story, Don’t it?

You heard me right.  For the first dozen years or so after I first heard the song, this is how what I understood the lyrics to be. Hey, mistaking lyrics is an easy thing to do… in fact, there are plenty of songs that are misunderstood.

Now that I think about it, perhaps those misunderstood lyrics do mean something to me as a woodworker. I’ve discovered during this cabinet job with my friend Paul that relying on a tape measure to do all of your measuring can lead to inaccuracies that translate to miscut boards. It’s surprisingly easy to measure a piece at 9 7/16 inches and come back from the saw with a piece that measures 7 9/16 inches.  Or 8 7/16 inches.

When you really need to be precise, you can buy a more accurate tape measure or a stainless laser-engraved rule…

But, I bet you can find the most accurate measuring tool sitting right in your scrap bucket.

Yes, I’m talking about a story stick.

Just what the heck is this magical story stick, and how does it work?  Gosh, it’s the easiest thing to use.  When you look at any woodworking project, there are two kinds of measurements.  Nominal and actual. The nominal measurement is what the piece is supposed to measure.  If you are working from a plan, and the plans say a face frame rail should be 24 inches long, well, it should be, right?

Then, there’s the real world.  Maybe your saw was just a bit off.  Maybe you had to plane a little extra to get rid of some machining marks.  Maybe you accidentally cut with the kerf on the wrong side of the blade.  Hey, stuff happens.  Remember, it’s not a mistake, but a design feature…

So, if you have to fit a drawer box which has to be a very specific  into this less than perfect opening, how are you going to be sure you hit the exact mark to allow enough room for the drawer slides and face frame, if you are building with one?

What you can do is get a piece of inexpensive wood or strip of plywood from the scrap pile.  I’ve found that lighter colored species make it easier to read your marks.  You just have to take this strip of wood, push it against the back of the cabinet and mark where the piece intersects the outside of the cabinet.  You just accurately measured the cabinet box’s depth.  Lay the stick across the front of the cabinet box, and mark the width.  That’s it.  No squinting to see where the cabinet’s width falls on the ruler. No deciding if you need to cut a piece strong a millimeter or 16th of an inch.  The measurement is what it is.

When you get back to the shop, building couldn’t be any easier. For this project, I built the drawer boxes to be 21 inches deep. I knew this would fit into the depth of the cabinet because, yes, I had measured the depth with the story stick and it fit in the marked space.

I was using a rabbet and dado joint for the fronts and backs of the drawers.  I knew I had to leave 1 inch of space free to fit the drawer into the space with the slides, and I was going to cut the depth of the rabbet at 3/8 of an inch, so by subtracting 1 3/4″ (1″ for the drawer space and 3/8″ x 2 for the length of the depth of the rabbet on both sides), I had my drawer width nailed. I subtracted this distance from the drawer opening width, set the stop on the miter gauge on my table saw and bingo, I was off to the races.

This system also works well for complex projects that would  require a notepad full of measurements and notations.  Instead of advanced calculus and an arcane measurement system, just a few sticks with the appropriate marks taken directly from the project’s dimensions would make your work so much easier.

Last December, when we had our kitchen counter tops replaced, the guy who came out to measure used only 20 or so strips of plywood, a hot glue gun and a pencil to get the dimensions he needed for fabrication.  Two weeks later, the installers moved the pieces in and laid them down perfectly on the first try.

That is the power of the story stick, and you’ll feel like a rock star once you learn all it can do for you!

I use a Keller dovetail jig for the majority of my dovetailing on projects. It’s easy to set up and makes cutting very quick.  However, the one knock on a fixed spacing jig like that is that it gives only one look to a project.

Not so.

There is a very easy way to change the spacing that doesn’t take much in the way of fiddling and gives very good results.

First, you have to make sure you have the piece clamped appropriately in a vise.  Determine which pieces will get the tails and which will get the pins.  In this case, you are looking at the outside of the tail board oriented face out  with the top facing left.

Here I am marking in 1/2″ from the edge of the board as a starting point for the guide.

With the jig in place, I use the dovetail bit to cut in every slot, creating an entire run of pins.

From there, I mark out the tails I want to remove. This is where I can set up my spacing and get a good idea of what the joint will look like.

Next, I place the comb of the jig over the tails I want to remove and clamp it in place.  I then use the dovetail bit to remove the xed out tails to open the pattern.

The results are pretty sweet… nice, crisp tails ready to scribe onto the pin board.

By carefully marking out which pins need to be routed, you can have them lined up accurately and just cut the pin sockets you need.  Here’s the pin board ready to go.

Now, what project is all of this stuff for?  Sorry… you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see!

Hey, everyone, Iggy the Shop Monkey here, and I want to finally give you some useful information on this blog. Sure, it took two and a half years to get to this point, but, hey, there’s a first time for everything…

I have no idea what Tom is up to these days.  He’s having trouble gluing up panels and then he starts monkeying around with some red, sparkly new fangled instrument.  Is this guy committed to woodworking or isn’t he?  Shesh, no wonder his glue ups look like the stuff I throw at people who bother me…

OK, here’s how any primate worth his fur glues up a panel without any issues.  Tom, pay attention, please….

First thing first – the big guy did plane up some pieces of wood for another glue up.  He got one side pretty good, but the other one was terrible.  I mean, what was he thinking?  So, I got on his silly little table saw and ripped the other edge nice and straight.  At least he left the table saw tuned up.  Good human.

Next, I took out my secret weapon.  Clamping cauls. I had made these babies up a while ago and bring them out when I need a good glue up.  Why don’t I share them with Tom?  He’d probably think I was playing Jenga.

I clamped the cauls above and below the panel after I smeared glue on the edges.  Then, here’s the key point that Tom just keeps forgetting.  All of those fancy clamps he has – well he needs to use them.  He keeps them hanging on his special clamp rack just collecting dust and bragging about them… but, he really needs to put them to use and clamp the silly panel together while the glue dries.  With the clamps spread too far apart, the goof is enjoying his slip and grip clamping technique. My way… it’s gonna be a nice, flat panel when all is said and done…

Oh, nice way to show up for the shop session, Tom.  Yes, tailless wonder, I glued the panels together for the special project you are building… now, be a good shop assistant and get me some bananas before you go and fool around with that bass guitar.

I can’t believe I share 99% of my DNA with this guy…

Building doors for cabinets and other pieces of furniture can be more complicated that you think. Sure, you are talking about something simple that covers and opening… but, even the most basic door can take many shapes. From a painted piece of MDF on butt hinges to a hand-cut divided light masterpiece inlaid with antique reproduction glass – you can make them as fancy or as plain as you would like.

For the majority of woodworkers, the classic frame and panel door is what’s going to be seen most frequently. Even something as seemingly straightforward as this can involve many different decisions. Do you build the frame with mitered rails and stiles? Haunched through tenons? How about making it look like a frame and panel door by applying molding to a flat panel? The options freeze many beginning woodworkers in their tracks.

However, one of the best options is to build the doors using a cope and stick setup on a shaper or router table. The cutters are either a matched pair of bits (to cut the groove and molding on the inside of the panel and to cut the ‘coped’ joint on the end of the rails that fit into the side stiles). Others allow the woodworker to disassemble and reassemble the bit to cut both profiles. Still others have both profiles on one bit and can be raised or lowered to get the desired results.

The ‘sticking’ bit cuts the profile on the edges and the slot that holds the door’s panel in place. The ‘coping’ part cuts a profile on the ends of the cross members (rails) that perfectly match the stick. They are very easy to use, but they do take some care to get right.

Eagle America’s Retail Store Manager, Miki, pointed out some of the pitfalls woodworkers commonly encounter. “Getting nice 90 degree profiles on the edge of the rails is critical to getting a square door. If you are off by even a little bit, it’s going to be very difficult to get it right.”

That’s one of the reasons why Eagle America and other tool manufacturers offer coping sleds to help cut this critical part of the joint. The sleds slide across the top of the router table and register against a fence or have a runner that slides in a miter slot. Woodworkers can then place the board down and clamp it tight. “It’s critical that the board be secure before trying to rout,” said Miki. “If it moves, you could easily ruin the cut.”

These sleds offer an additional benefit. “Since the board is backed up by the stop, it reduces the likelihood of tear out where the bit exits the cut. Since the bit is cutting into the end grain of the rail, this is a very strong possibility.”

During any woodworking operation, safety is paramount. By using a clamp to hold the word down, woodworkers can keep their hands safely away form the bit and maintain firm control over the sled. “Anything that helps you make cuts more safely enhances the enjoyment of the hobby.”

Does it matter if you cut the cope or stick of the joint first? “Absolutely not,” said Miki. “It’s all a matter of personal preference. However, if you need to make many doors for a project like a set of kitchen cabinets, you might want to run the ‘stick’ part of the joint on the edges of the rails and stiles. You can run dozens of feet of stock this way, then cut what you need to length and cope the ends as you build.”

Eagle’s coping sleds are made with replaceable backing stops that can be replaced if they get dinged up or you use a different bit profile.

Eric, Eagle America’s Product Manager, mentions another important fact about building doors, “Make sure you do not glue the solid wood or plywood panel into place when assembling your doors. Even finished, the wood will want to expand and contract to equalize moisture content. Gluing the panel in place – even by inadvertently having the glue from the frame assembly getting onto the panel, can lead to broken joints in the future.” Eric advised using a product such as door tape or Space Balls to keep the unglued panel from rattling in the frame.

While cope and stick joints are very attractive and easy to cut, some woodworkers feel the joint may not be strong enough for larger, heavier doors. “In that case,” Miki said, “it’s possible to cut a floating tenon to further reinforce the joint. But, for the vast majority of cabinet doors, the cope and stick joint with today’s modern glues will be plenty strong to endure years of use and abuse.”

An attractive joint that makes door making easier? There’s no reason to put off door making now that you know the secrets of the cope and stick joint.