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The older I get, the more trouble I have tightening clamps adequately. The solution came from my other passion: fishing.

Threaded inserts are a great way to add the strength and knockdown capability of nuts and bolts to your wooden creations. But for them to function well, they need to be driven in straight. I’ve found this simple guide makes short work of getting it right.

Instead of using a dust bag, I prefer attaching my orbital sander to a shop vac for the superior dust collection it offers. But wrangling the hose presents challenges of its own. I tried an overhead support but found it limiting for large panels or when I had to move my sanding table. A better solution is to attach the hose to my shop apron.

Edge gluing boards is always a challenge. Even if you’ve added biscuits to keep the pieces aligned, getting everything in place atop your bar clamps before the glue drips is stressful at best. I’ve found working vertically makes the process go a lot better. 

For a recent project, I needed 2×6s tapered in thickness. My first thought was to tilt the blade on my table saw, but a fully-raised blade isn’t high enough for the job. So I turned to my thickness planer.

We all know that if you asked three woodworkers how to do something, you’d get four different answers. But this isn’t a problem. It simply illustrates that there is more than one way to do any one thing, especially in woodworking. This explains why Tips & Tricks is the most popular two pages in the magazine: Woodworkers of all stripes share their way (or ways) to save you time, money, energy, and space or to save you from potential injury.

One of the challenges of turning hollow pieces is that you can’t see where the tip of the tool is as it is concealed inside the workpiece.

When I first got my sprayer, I used to improvise, propping up pieces to be finished on all sorts of boxes, horses, and such. Recently I decided to bite the bullet and build a proper turntable.

After struggling with trying to keep loose pads in place when using pipe clamps, I hit upon the idea of attaching the pads to the clamps.

In addition to its intended use, I get extra duty from my folding ladder. I made a series of shelves from scrap plywood that I sit on the rungs as needed. For some tasks, I’ll use a single shelf to keep my tools readily available at a convenient height, or I’ll use several shelves as a drying rack when finishing multiples of a project. I also use the ladder as a support when sawing long pieces with my chop saw.