marc - today, i'm going to give you five pieces of woodworking advice, it's something i like to call, "woodworking not-so-common sense." ♫ hit it
the most essential woodworking tools, (groovy music) don't mill your stocktoo far ahead of time. even after you mill yourboards flat and square, they'll have a tendency to move over time.
so if you wait a few daysbefore cutting your joints, you might have a toughtime getting everything to register properly and your joinery will be a little bit wonky. so try to cut your joinery within 24 hours of milling the stock to proper size. and if you're not going toget to the project parts for a while, leave themin their rough state, and then work on them when you have time.
don't chase thousandths, when your eyeballs will do the job. feeler gauges and caliperscan be really handy for dialing in your equipment,but be realistic about it. for instance, if i'mcalibrating my chop saw, i can drive myself nutstrying to dial it in to the nearest thousandth,or i could simply make a cut, and check it with a square. when it's square to myeyes, then it's certainly
good enough for woodworking. and by all means, take your time setting up your machines and set them up to the best of your abilities, but, where the rubber meets the road, is what it does to the work. here's another example. i know that my table saw surface is by no means perfectly flat.
i could stress out about it,and try to get a replacement for the top, or i can simply ask myself, "do these discrepancies affect the work?" if the answer is no, thenwhy am i worried about it? always drill pilot holes for screws. without a pilot hole, wood tends to split. the denser the wood, the morelikely this is to happen. so it's a real good ideato pre-drill a hole, so the body of the screw has aclear space to drive through.
most times, we want tocounter-sync our screw heads and the pilot holes are typically built into the process, thankfully. whenever possible, usecauls with your clamps. clamps are made of metal and plastic, and those are typically harder than the wood that we're clamping. as a result, the wooddents under pressure. most times, you don't even realize it,
until you're applying a coat of finish, so take precautions by using cauls. a caul is nothing morethan a scrap piece of wood, that sits between theclap and the work piece. it not only protects the wood, but helps distributethe clamping pressure. and here's a tip fellowwoodworker michael olsen brought up in a recent live session, don't use wood that's harder
than the wood you're clamping it to. so if the caul is made ofsomething really dense, but the wood itself is pineor poplar, something soft, the wood, as a caul, could even dent. alright, so use softer woodsfor your cauls if possible. whatever you do, don't surround a solid wood panel with a frame. i see folks doing this time and time again and it may look beautifulwhen you finish it,
but nearly every instanceends in disaster. wood expands and contractsacross its width, so if you frame it out, asi did in this chess board, the wood has no place to go and simply busts out of the frame, which is what eventuallyhappened to this piece. so why is something like this okay? clearly, it's a solid woodpanel, and a frame around it. well, when they built it,they allowed for the movement
of this middle panel, itessentially floats in that space because the grooves arecut a little bit deeper, to allow the panel to expandand contract across the width. if you want to surrounda panel with a frame, the panel needs to be made from a stable substrate like plywood, as is the case with this hall table which features a jatoba frame, and a raised centerpanel made from plywood,
and shop-sawn veneer. over time, this all becomes second nature, but in the beginning, it's really nice to have someone point these things out so you can avoid making themistakes in the first place. thanks for watching. (acoustic guitar music)
