Using a Router Freehand - Beginners #11
- Read Time: 5 mins
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Most people who purchase wood routers, start off by purchasing just the router unit - no router table. A router by itself is a great tool, and is enhanced by matching it with a router table. Although the standalone router has somewhat limited use, for some, it is all they need and does a perfect, quick, easy to replicate job for them.
In this video and associated article we talk about using a standalone or freehand router unit, how to use it safely, how to set it up and what you can hope to achieve with it. In our case we will be using a Plunge Router, but a Fixed Base Router would have similar set up, with the exception of the depth setting. If you are looking for more Router Information you can also purchase Colin's One Hour Popular Woodworking Course "Router Basics" ... click here to check it out.
In order to make this quick and easy to understand we are going to try on put everything in point form so it is easier and quicker to read through. We would appreciate your feedback on how this works for you ....
Pallet Furniture - Make a Bookshelf
- Read Time: 1 min
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Every woodworker loves to receive FREE WOOD, such as pallet wood. But like most things that are free, there is a catch and that catch is the free wood can dull or even ruin some of your good woodworking blades so special precautions are needed. Even after you have dis-assembled a pallet, and you think you have removed all the screws and nails, there could still be some left that only a woodworking metal detector will find (click read more to see links) ... OR, even worse, there are almost always little rocks and dirt that are ground into the wood that will dull or ruing a blade instantly.
I love to use pallet wood for certain projects, it gives a great look with little work, but most often when I am using pallet wood I will only use my circular saw, my jig saw and my reciprocating saw. Blades for these units are reasonably prices and easy to get. I NEVER run pallet wood through my jointer, planer or bandsaw, and only occasionally with a throw-away blade will I use my table saw.
To me, the trick with making pallet furniture is to make it look elegant, despite being made from pallet wood. In the case of making this bookshelf, in order to make the bookshelf look less clunky, we decided to change up the end pieces ....
Cold Bluing a Rifle Barrel
- Read Time: 5 mins
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Cold Bluing a rifle barrel is not strictly a woodworking project, but since it relates to the whole aspect of gun restoration, and because we actually did cold blue the barrel, we are covering it here. Bluing is a process to help prevent rusting of exposed steel and is sometimes used on some woodworking tools as well.
We are of the belief that hot bluing is the best, at least in my experience, but it is also somewhat complicated and needs special equipment to do, OR you need to find someone who does this and again in my experience, it is not cheap.
The other thing that needs to be noted up front, is that I have seen some pretty crappy hot blued barrels and receiver plates, not because the bluing was all that bad, but because the preparation of the metal was poor. If the metal is not polished and cleaned properly it doesn't matter what kind of bluing you put on, the finished product will not look good.
To that end, we made sure that the barrel was extremely well sanded and prepared before we ever started the bluing process. In our case we were using Outers Gun Blue Kit, a product we had never used before, so were quite interested to see how it performed, and we were ....
Re-Finishing a Gun Stock
- Read Time: 6 mins
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Owners of rifles know that taking firearms back and forth to the target range and just general handling can be hard on guns, particularly wooden stocks. If the gun is old, it could have been finished with varnish, which over years can crackle and chip depending on conditions. In this article we will discuss the different aspects of refinishing a wooden rifle stock to restore the firearm to something close to it's original beauty.
Before you refinish or even handle any firearm, it is up to you to ensure you are working safely for yourself and for those around you.
The first thing to consider when refinishing a rifle stock is - should this rifle even be refinished? Some rifles can dramatically lose their value when the original finish is removed and replaced. If you are planning to go ahead with the refinishing, you will need to remove all the hardware from the rifle.
Once the hardware is removed, the first step is to remove the existing finish. This can be done with sandpaper, but is best started off with some sort of a remover if possible. A good paint and varnish remover should get the stock down to either the natural wood, or at least to a stained wood. At this point you will likely have removed most of the nasty marks on the stock with exception of those that are deep into the wood. The next step is ....
Easiest Way to Break Down Pallets
- Read Time: 3 mins
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Who wants free wood? Pretty much anyone who does woodworking right! Well, there is a catch, like anything else that is free. What I am talking about using Pallet Lumber. All over the world there are free pallets, and some of them have some great wood. I was so intrigued with collecting and re-cycling pallet wood at one time in my life, I wrote a business plan for starting up a Pallet Furniture Manufacturing business. What I discovered was, there is often a lot of waste in trying to salvage pallet wood, there is a big cost in acquisition (finding the pallets), the wood is extremely hard on all woodworking tools, particularly jointers and planers because of all the ground in dirt and small rocks. But for individual woodworkers who are aware of the problems of working with pallet woods, there can still be many rewards.
During the process of writing the business plan, I had the opportunity to collect and break down pallets into useable wood, and I tried many different methods of breaking down or disassebling the pallets. This video represents what I found was the easiest and most effective way of breaking pallets down ....
All About Wobble Wheel Dado Blades
- Read Time: 4 mins
- Hits: 19791
Many years back, some number of companies produced a special blade that could cut dados with just a single blade. The invention was really pretty cool, but simple. The single blade would have to rotate a bit on it's axis which would mean that it could plough out a trough of wood, depending on how far the blade was turned. When it was not turned I would carve out a slot approximately 1/8 inch wide, but when it was turned fully it could make a dado cut that was well in excess of 3/4 inch. These blades were called wobble wheels and were quite common at one time. I am not sure if they are still made and I have not been able to find a source for them in recent years.
Like all things that change, the wobble wheel has all but gone away, replace instead by the stack dado set which consists of a couple of outer cutting blades and sandwiched between them are something called chippers, and together they are used to dado cuts of varying widths, depending on how many chippers are installed.
I used a wobble wheel for many years and always found to make decent cuts, my only real complaint was it often took a lot of time getting the width the perfect size. Over the years I have heard (but never actually tested) from many people, that wobble wheels, because of their design create somewhat coved bottoms on the dado cuts. Based on how the blade works, it's pretty easy to assume this would of course be the case, but how much of a cove does it make and does it really make any difference? That's what I set out to see ...
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