WoodWorkWeb - Woodworking Community

Making and iPad or Tablet Stand

Read Time: 5 mins

tablet stand Trying to integrate technology into a woodworking shop can be a bit of a challenge, depending on the tool. It's pretty easy to purchase cordless drills, grinders, sanders etc. but what about bringing technical information into the workshop in the form of a Tablet or iPad? To start off with, the tablet needs to have a place to stand, because you can's always be picking it up and holding it, and often your hands may be dusty or dirty, which you also don't want to transfer to an electronic device, so the first step was to get a stand for my tablet. I had looked at the dozens and dozens of tablet and iPad stands, but found nothing that really inspired me, yeah, they all worked but ... hey, this is a workshop and here we try to make nice looking, functional things out of wood - not plastic.

I decided a simple "sandwich board" type design would work well, would be easy to make and would look good. The first step in the simple design was deciding on what angle would work best for both sitting and standing, and I determined that 30 degrees was near perfect for both.

Since I wanted the stand to be quite rigid, I decided that making box joints along the top edge would not only look great, but once glued, would hold the stand together extremely well and last for a long, long time. Next I had to determine what wood that would look nice, yet would hold up well which means it is probably best being a hardwood, and what thickness would it be. Then I needed to .....

Evaluating Yonico Router Bits

Read Time: 5 mins

There are many different brands of router bits available on the market, from good quality brand name router bits, to much lower quality unknown names. The better quality brand name router bits almost always will come with some sort of a guarantee, the no-name brands may or may not come with some sort of a guarantee, you need to ask.
How much use a router bit gets is often one determining factor on whether or not to purchase a brand name bit or not. If a router bit is being used a lot, maybe even in a commercial setting, good quality bits are essential, not only because of their warranty and performance, but in some cases, also because of the longivity as a working tool bit.

Designing Furniture with a Fibonacci Gauge

Read Time: 5 mins

Every woodworker spends a protion of their time designing things to build or modifying existing plans to suit their own purposes and needs. Many woodworkers are also designers who start with a blank piece of paper and design their works from a concept or idea in their head, and plan the whole project out on paper.
One of the challenges of designing projects from scratch is ... how do you ensure they "look good", now I know that what looks good for one person may not look good for another, but we are talking about the "balance" of a project, not about whether you actually like the idea or not. For example you may not like the design of a certain chair, while other do, but the design of that chair may or may not be "in balance", which could be contributing to why some may not like it.

Back in early Greek times, when the concept of mathematics was being developed, a very keen mathematitian discovered a set of numbers that can be used to help desginers and architects design projects that are "in balance"". This set of numbers was morphed into an artchitectual device called a Fibonacci Gauge. The device is a simple concept that is basically like a three legged devider, but with a bit of a twist. When you set the 2 outside legs, the inner leg moves as well to a designated spot, and it is the middle leg that is used as well, in helping to design furniture, buildings and almost any type of visual artistic work.

In our case we need to use the Fibonaccin Gauge to help design a pleasing look to a small side table we had seen in a publication several years ago. We wanted to make a table of the similar design, but could not find the plans so had to go about making our own in a manner that ...

Making a Coffee Grinder

Read Time: 5 mins

grinder_tmb It's not very often that such a small woodworking project requires so many different tools and requires number of skills from the woodworker. In this video we made a working coffee grinder, well actually we purchased the grinding part from Lee Valley tools and made the wooden base that the grinder sits on.

It sounds like a pretty easy project but we decided to make all the corners of the box as box joints. Inside the outer box is a drawer that catches the ground coffee bits as the handles is turned and beans are ground. Then, there is one last element, so that many of the coffee grinding bits do not fall between the drawer and the outer box there is an inner lining that makes sure the ground beans all fall nicely into the drawer.

The first element is to make the outer box. We adhered to the instructions packaged with the grinding component and found them easy to follow and accurate, so why not make things easy and follow their instructions. Since we decided to make box joints for the outer box we needed a box joint jig (which we also needed for other upcoming projects too) so we made that first of all (see our other videos for details on this).

Making a Box Joint Jig - UPDATED

Read Time: 8 mins

Box Joints are one way of connecting corners in woodworking. They look great and when they are glued together they make a very strong joint which makes them suitable for drawers and boxes, especially ones that get high usage. The problem with most box joint jigs is that they are often finickity to use and very often will only make one, or at the most two sides at the same time. From what we have been able to gather, this jig was originally conceived by Lynn Sabin and later modified by others.
We have taken the original plans and modified them yet again, by primarily making the base much wider. The advantage to making the base wider is that the jig can now be adapted to cut wood flat side down. This means a type of weave pattern can now be cut into wood and not just on the edges.
Anyone who has tried to cut trivets manually on a table saw will be doing back flips when they see just how easy it is to make multiple cuts, accurately and easily.

Watch this Video on YouTube here - https://youtu.be/XEeWSepGqYI

We made the original version of this jig first of all to see how it worked and what problems we might encounter along the way. We were so happy with the first version that we decided to re-make the jig with a few modifications and changes to make it even better and more versatile. For more info and links, read on ...

The Rockler Glue Tool

Read Time: 1 min

Some of the greatest frustrations in woodworking come from seeminly simple tasks. Like when you glue boards together, it's important not to get glue on parts of the boards where you don't want it because when it dries it can effect the finish of the wood. Over the years I have tried everything to spread glue from my own fingers, to little wooden sticks, foam brushes, good quality paint brushes, disposable paint brushes, chips of plastic ... pretty much anything that I hope will work. I always seem to be looking for something that is easy to use and more importantly, something that spreads the glue evenly over the area to be glued so I am not wasting glue, but so I am getting enough so that I avoid getting voids in the joints.

Now, someone has invented a little glue brush that spreads glue evenly, particularly over the edges of boards such as when you are glueing narrow boards together to make wider boards. One of the problems with gluing boards together is that if you miss putting enough glue on a particular spot, when the glue dries you get "Voids" in the wood, little areas where there wasn't enough glue and it leaves small holes between the boards being joined. These are most annoying because they are hard to fill and stand out like crazy when you are trying to finish a woodwork piece. This little brush actually does a great job of spreading glue evenly because of it's large bristles. If by chance you are like me and often forget to clean the brush after you use it, the dried glue can be easily cleaned off after it is dry.

These are great little brushes .. inexpensive and easy to use and one of the great little addtions to helping to keep the frustration out of your woodworking time.

Page 94 of 103