Plate Joiners For Perfect Fit

The Ease Of Joining When You Have The Right Tool

Once found almost exclusively in cabinet shops, plate joiners (sometimes called biscuit joiners) have become increasingly common in home workshops and on construction sites, and for good reason: they make the process of joining two boards together fast, simple, and safe.

Useful for making butt joints, miter joints, and edge-to-edge joints, plate joinery can be used with just about any type of wood, as well as with materials ranging from particle board to solid-surface countertops. With a plate joiner, you can quickly make bookshelves and cabinets, reinforce many of the joints made by trim carpenters, or invent entirely new applications.

How Does It Work?

Plate joiners are relatively small, barrel-shaped tools that take up less room in the toolbox than a circular saw. They are designed to do only one thing: cut crescent-shaped slots of various sizes. But plate joinery is actually a two-part process. Once you've made slots in the two pieces to be joined, the second step is to put glue in the slots and insert biscuits into the mated pieces.

Essential Woodworking Machines & Power Tools

Woodworking machines are precise power tools that are typically far too large and heavy to be portable, which means that they're rarely found on a job site. Instead, these tools will be most likely confined to your wood shop. Fortunately, they're so useful that you'll be quite willing to build your fine woodworking projects in your wood shop and carry the projects to your final destination.

While there are many additional woodworking machines not discussed in this article, the following are probably the most versatile fine woodworking machines & tools that are designed primarily for use in the wood shop.

Table Saws: The Workhorses Of The Wood Shop

The Table Saw is undoubtedly the most versatile machine in any shop, and should be the woodworker's first machine purchase. A good table saw becomes the centerpiece of the workshop, as the woodworker uses it to rip, square, miter, groove, shape and join pieces. A quality table saw will make completing nearly any woodworking project easier.

Table Saw Features

Every table saw should have a smooth, heavy work surface, a handle for raising and lowering the saw blade, a separate handle for adjusting the angle of the blade and connections for dust collection. The saw should have a strong motor that starts smoothly with little vibration and enough horsepower to make deep cuts through harder woods.

Safety Equipment

Every table saw should include a blade guard, to protect the woodworker from the exposed saw blade, and a large, easily accessible on/off switch. Most modern table saws utilize a large paddle switch that is pulled to turn on the saw, and pushed to turn it off. As such, when the woodworker's hands are busy steadying the material being cut, they can turn the saw off merely pressing their knee against the switch.

Woodworking Tips for Using Your Circular Saw

Circular Saw Woodworking Tips

A circular saw is a absolute necessity for a carpenter on a construction site, but there are a number of uses for a circular saw in fine woodworking projects as well. For instance, when used with a straight-edge, a circular saw can cut sheet goods such as plywood as accurately (and with more ease) than a table saw. With special blades, a circular saw can even be used to cut curved shapes. Learn how a circular saw can be used on your fine woodworking projects. 

Circular Saws

While the table saw is probably the most useful power tool for a woodworker, for a carpenter on a job site, the most useful power tool would probably be the circular saw. A quality circular saw can be used for a wide variety of tasks both on a job site and in the wood shop, as the same tool can cross-cut and rip boards, both square to the face and at bevels of up to 45 degrees. Here are some tips to consider when choosing a circular saw.

Circular Saw Measuring Jig

When working in your shop, your table saw is always at the ready for making a variety of cuts quickly and easily. If you are on a construction site, you don't have that luxury. You can, however, make a considerable number of similar cuts on a job site using a circular saw, a straight-edge and a circular saw jig. In this guide, learn how to make a circular saw measuring jig that will let you align your straight-edge to make precision circular saw cuts quickly and easily.

Panel Cutting and Ripping Jigs

The main purpose of a woodworking jig is to make a difficult task easier, safer or easily repeatable. While many commercial woodworking jigs are available on the market, a number of woodworking jigs can be built in the woodshop. Two very useful homemade jigs are used for panel cutting and ripping boards using a circular saw. By following the step-by-step how-to instructions in this article, you can make these jigs and use them on your woodworking projects.

Choosing a Portable Wood Shop Vacuum

Many woodworking shops have central dust collection systems that are connected to all major woodworking tools in the shop to keep sawdust to a minimum. In addition to keeping the tools' work surfaces cleaner, these dust collection systems will help keep sawdust out of the tool motors, which should lead to longer life for the machinery.

The problem is that most hobbyist or professional woodworkers may have limited shop space or a limited budget that prohibits the installation of a full-scale dust collection system.

The solution? A portable wood shop vacuum (sometimes referred to as a portable dust extraction system or a wet/dry vac). These units are versatile, as many can suck up liquids as well as dry materials. However, for woodworking purposes, when choosing one of these shop vacs, there are a few features for which you should be sure to look.

Woodworking Features

The first feature to look for when choosing a woodworking vacuum is air flow. If the vacuum doesn't have a large enough motor to pull in the majority of the sawdust that your woodworking tool creates, it isn't much good. Compare the CFM (cubic feet-per-minute) ratings between different units. Typically, a motor with a higher amp or HP rating will have a higher CFM, but not always.

Second, check to see that the hose is large enough to handle your biggest woodworking tools, and that you have the ability to connect to all of your power tools. You may need to buy an accessory kit to match all of your power tool ports.

Hand Planes for Home Projects

The woodworker's favorite that never goes out of style

You can finally see the light at the end of your floor-refinishing project, but there's a stubborn gap between two floorboards that you can't ignore. Or perhaps the frame you painstakingly mitered for your neighbor's oil painting is just right except for one uneven joint. Or you have a perfectly good board of white oak, but you'd be much happier if you could give it a new surface to knock off a few nicks and bring out the beauty of its original grain.

Planes to the rescue! These handy tools can be as simple as their name or as complex as table saws. The key is choosing the proper plane or planer for your project.

Form and Function

The purpose of all planes and planers is to shave, shear, reduce, or smooth a wooden surface. There are several categories of planes, but this guide focuses on hand-held planes, with a brief detour into motorized portable planers.

In the case of floorboard gap, a length of veneer with glue on each side can be wedged into the space; after the glue dries, a simple block plane can shear off and level the extra wood. (The same system works for split tabletops.) For an unevenly mitered frame corner, a block plane or jack plane will repair small gaps; use it front-to-back. Wider planks can be refinished by using a succession of hand planes or by bringing out the big guns: a thickness planer, either table-mounted or "portable" (expect these to be heavy enough to warrant temporary mounting).

Groovin With Routers: The Right Tool For Building Furniture & Cabinetry

Routers are all about grooves. You can make straight, square grooves with a circular saw or a miter saw, but doing so takes a long time and it's hard to get the ends of the cut to look neat. You're out of luck entirely if you need a curved slot (say, for a roll-top desk cover) or one with a non square profile (such as those used for decorative moldings). If you're going to build furniture or cabinetry, you have to be able to make grooves and create profiled edges. In other words, you need a good router.

The Two Types: Plunge and Fixed-Base

There are two basic varieties of routers: plunge and fixed-base. Plunge routers allow you to make cutting-depth adjustments on the fly, without having to turn off the motor. Because you can move the router into position and then lower the bit accurately, they're great for blind dadoes and other slots that don't terminate at the edge of the workpiece. They also excel at cutting mortises and following patterns. Some folks don't like plunge routers because they tend to have higher centers of gravity than fixed-base routers of similar power, and are therefore more awkward to handle. However, this isn't a problem if you plan to mount your router in a router table, which you can buy for relatively little money or make in an afternoon.

Fixed-base routers are best used for jobs that don't require midcut adjustments to the depth of the cut. They're great for dado work, cutting rabbets, and putting decorative facings on edges, and D-handled versions can be turned on and off with a trigger switch so you don't have to take your hand off the router. Fixed-base routers also tend to be smaller, lighter, and less expensive than plunge routers. Actually, you can lock a plunge router at a certain depth and use it just like a fixed-base router. But unless you have a specific need for the adjustable-depth feature of a plunge router, you'll probably be very happy with a fixed-base router.