I love holiday time, it gives me a period of uninterrupted time in the workshop to work on some new ideas and changes I have been putting off over the past several months. Sometimes they are experiments, often from suggestions to others that will hopefully lead to permanent solutions or processes.
Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/q6I2wNa0BHs/a>
Many of these seem to lead to the table saw, and this episode is no different, but there are a few variables thrown in for variety ...
Someone asked me a short time ago, "what can I do to stop glue squeeze-out?" and my first response was "Why would you want to stop squeeze-out?" and when he gave me his answer, yup! .. it made sense. He was creating some special interior work on a vintage house and needed to make some decorative headers for door frames which involved gluing 2 or 3 larger boards together. His complaint was that when he glued them together the squeeze-out glue was hard to get at and hard to clean up because of the angles he was working at and he was unable to get a nice clean line separation between the boards.
I suggested he route a ditch or channel for the glue to go into, then explained what I meant ... and he went on to finish the work and was delighted with less work and a much cleaner board separation. After our conversation, it struck me that this was a technique I had not shared yet, so this workshop upgrade was a good opportunity to add that in because it sort of is a jig idea ... at least a jig for the trim router in the form of a fence.
Another task from long ago I wanted to try out was a full-fit sacrificial or waste fence or table saw fence. This is a fence that will slip on easily for those times I need the blade to be right at or even slightly inside the table saw fence. You could also use a fence like this for cutting dados that are close or even inside the fence and this way you don't mark up or cut into your factory fence. I decided to use MDF because it is always flat and straight ... well, almost always. In the past, I had been using a couple of adjustable clamps as I showed in the video, but they don't work for all situations so this is still a work in progress.
Part of the reason for making this fence was a need to trim some plywood shelves I was working on that had been edge trimmed with oak. The oak plywood has such a thin oak veneer on it that it is very hard to hand plane down without marring the veneer. This way I can trim the oak edging to a very fine edge and all I will need to do after is a bit of sanding. An easy job for my new full-fit sacrificial or waste fence. Easy to put on and take off and I can use it for more than just dado cutting.
For some time I have been fussing with the push pads I made for my jointer. I made new push pads because the ones that came with my original jointer have long since lost their gripping power. What I did was make new wooden handles, then attached them to some small squares of Baltic Birch Plywood, then covered that plywood with some thin anti-skid material. The new pads worked fine for many, many months, then slowly started losing some grip. To solve this I found that cleaning them did wonders, but they are harder to clean because of the type of material, with through-holes. I wondered what else I could put on these pads that were anti-skid, then I remembered "Great Tape" the rug anti-skid material that I line the underside of my Magswitches with to give them even better holding strength.
Since I didn't know for sure if the Great Tape would work in this instance, rather than take off the anti-skid on my existing set, I decided to make another pair of push pads, and that way I would be able to compare them easier. Well the Great Tape versions are excellent ... but they are also new, but my big hope is that they will be much easier are more effective to clean because there are no holes, the Great Tape is solid, so will clean much better ... or maybe it won't even need cleaning, who knows ... I will keep you up to date on how it goes.
I'm finding more and more uses for this Great Tape .. you may be able to find some locally in your area, but otherwise, you can check it out on the woodworkweb Amazon Store by clicking HERE 
Copyright Colin Knecht
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