I love it when people tell me improvements they have made on my various tips and jigs, some of them are brilliant and often even more simple, which makes them even more valuable. In this episode, I have a mix of new and some previous ideas, but with subscriber updates that I thought were certainly worth sharing ...
Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/DSX9FkhZZhs
I have had many, many people sending me ideas and updates, and some of you have and are very prolific in your ideas ... you have many of them to share, so I will start off with Michael from near Vancouver Canda who has many ideas he has shared .. this is one of them ...
Michael sent me a picture of his tables saw (which he has recently upgraded to a better one) and what he was showing was the throat plate on the old saw which had a gap between the blade and the side of the saw that was easily 1/4 inch or more. The problem with this is that any time you want to rip thin strips of wood, or smaller pieces, they fall into the slot and either get lost, damaged or sucked up into the dust collector.
To fix this, Michael came up with a simple idea, he dropped the saw blade down and run a strip of duct tape from the front of the saw to the back that covered the saw blade and much of throat plate. Next, he winds the saw blade up, and now he can rip wood comfortably and safely without it dropping down into the saw.
Another frequent contributor is Jacob, who has come up with a number of ideas relating to the vertical drilling jig I made a short time ago. I really liked this idea, which is simply to use the jig as support for drilling dowel holes, which of course you can then use as a form of wood joinery. And by sliding the jig back and forth on the drill press table, you can make the holes at the same distance from the drill bit along the same plane, and you can do this both horizontally and vertically. This technique does take a bit of time to set up to be accurate, but for some jobs, this is a simple easy way of drilling dowel holes.
Roy sent in this idea of attaching a toothbrush to the wheels of your bandsaw. As you can see in the upper left-hand corner, my bandsaw already has a brush, but many of the older bandsaws do not have these and they easy to attach. In the past, I have also used a small scrub brush, cut in half, but a toothbrush works just as well and is probably free!!
All you need to do is make a small platen to mount it to on a place on your wheel that is not going to be affected by the blade and often you can use that powerful 3M double-sided tape to attach it. These brushes help to keep the rubber tires on the bandsaw wheels clean and running more smoothly. 
And here is another improvement on a thin strip ripping jig I made some time ago, that Terry came up with. I really like this jig, it works great and it uses a couple of small toggle clamps (that are not always readily available). What Terry figured out was a way to replace the 2 toggle clamps with a hanger bolt (wood thread on one side, machine thread on the other) and by using your router, or even a drill press to do drill out a slot, you could make a small slotted piece of wood that would act as the wood stop and now you replace both the toggle clamps with on inexpensive hanger bolt and washer and wing nut. Brilliant idea.
Thanks to everyone who has and is sending me ideas ... the pictures are a great help to me and I will continue to share your ideas with everyone ...
Copyright Colin Knecht
woodworkweb.copm
