5 Beginner Woodworking Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner

When I started in carpentry, I was like you. I did not have much money. I didn't have many skills, but I wanted to build amazing things and I wanted to do it right now, acquiring those skills. Building some of the beautiful things we all see on the Internet takes a while. I don't want you to have to search the Internet in every corner of

woodworking

to find improvements for your work, so I have a good list of posts. five things you can do right now that will help you improve your

woodworking

without spending a lot of time and money so let's get to the first tip that I think all

beginner

s should use will be the tool called a plug cutter or below you can buy dials at certain sizes or you can make them yourself this tool makes it super easy here we have a butt joint we have two super ugly looking screw holes on the outside here but I'm smart I know that hole is 3 8 inches.

I also know that this plug cutter is also 3 8 inches and we're going to put it on a hand drill because we're only cutting one, but usually when you use a drill it allows you to cut plugs to match or contrast, so here we have something of maple, so I can go in and cut a maple plug that is literally made from the same material as the other end of the board we used. I just made that joint and this is great for drawer boxes and honestly any woodworking where you're going to join something together, all you do now is add a little bit of glue to the joint, put your add on if you want. more professional, you can even out the grain, this grain goes this direction and obviously that joint goes that direction, let it settle a little bit and in the meantime we're going to drill a contrasting one into a walnut, which I tend to be a big fan of because I think the contrast plugs are Super Rad and they add a lot of cool contrast to the joint, same as it's a lot of glue, it's like too much glue here now.

I like the glue settings. I also want to make a suggestion for this dial cutter from dfm toolworks I made a tic tac as you can see here it's super easy you can balance it from this which I think is 5 8 up to 1 8 here you just stick it through the hole they sell. This for about 60 bucks and plug cutters are very cheap and very easy to find at your big box store if you want to get into it, so now that they're set up a little bit, let's cut them out and show you what this looks like. you know maple matches the grain so well you can barely tell it's there and this is not that finish so an easy way to upgrade your woodworking add some dowels to your face screws and you can really start making it things are seen. great and you don't have to invest in a silly pocket hole jig.

Many of us use it, but it uses blue tape instead of double-sided tape with the addition of CA glue. Say, for example, I have these four tables and I want to make them all exactly the same size instead of making one and then trying to mimic and copy them all. We can do all that work at once. All you have to do is take the blue ribbon you want to place it on. the bottom of them all in a relatively similar way, so here you will need CA glue and an activator. I like the pump type products, but there are a lot of other good things out there.

This one is medium, you don't want to use the thickest one. Fill everything you do, draw a line along one piece and then with the other piece, spray the activator on the tape, you'll flip it over to make sure it's lined up, line up the corners and everything else, push it down , wait a couple of seconds and Now these boards are glued but they are not permanent, so we have two more here. I'm going to do the same thing and then to simplify it, I'm going to do it one more time to line up all four pieces, so that's a good example of something that what you want to do is say you want to make a drawer pull right now, all you have to do is to do is mark it on this piece and then we can cut it into all four pieces, it's going to be exactly the same, okay, that's cool too.

This way, if you want to punch holes in something and line them all up or make them perfect or whatever, pull them apart and you can see that it doesn't leave any residue and it's much easier to remove than double-sided tape, most tape. double sided are made for carpets, they get very sticky, they get very thick, but all of these parts will now be exactly the same and it's much easier and cheaper than buying double sided tape for most applications. This next tip will be for those of you who have a jointer and are looking to make better table joints.

When I started, my first jointer was a Craigslist purchase and it wasn't the best tool. I always had problems with glue joints not being tight on my table tops and panel gloves or whatever. I always thought the jointer wasn't that good, it's actually very difficult to keep a perfect jointer, so this tip, regardless of whether your jointer is set up perfect or not, will allow you to glue much better first thing. What you are going to do is place your boards in the order in which you are going to glue them. I like to mark mine in the corner and number them so we know one goes to two, two to three, keeping it simple. go to the assembler, so if you're not familiar, this makes things flat on one side, you have a cutter head, a bed and a fence, those are the three things I'm talking about here, what you want to do en Make your fences as square as possible.

I keep these engineering squares on the joint and you can see here that they are slightly to the right and this happens from time to time and it is quite common that I try to adjust them as best as I can. but actually most of the time it will come out outside the square, extreme example, let's move it back to the square here and I'll actually leave it out a little bit to show you how this trick works even better when If you're joining boards, you want to join an edge first and then rip the other edge on the table saw.

Usually this will give you a pretty solid glue, but if you do that and you don't get a solid glue, that's where this trick comes in, so here's the trick when you glue these boards together, the only thing that matters is the angle of this face with this face, okay, so if I swear these two boards, one and two, like this, I can put this whole piece together right here. at the same time and it will give me a perfect joint because they will mirror each other whether they are in or out, anyway I won't join them at the same time because some might say that's unsafe, which I'm going to do is make sure I reference the fence the same way, so remember our fence is out of square, we know that, but I'm going to have the back of the board one against the fence and then the face. of board two against the fence now when they are joined you can see the join is perfect and I showed you that in my Joiner the fence is not square and when I learned this trick it made my UPS glue panel look much better and while we are in the assembler, here is an additional tip.

I have a 10 inch wide jointer, but my first jointer was six inches, so what I'm going to do is reduce it here to six. I show you a tip for making boards wider than your carpenter's width. First you're going to want to remove the fence and here we're going to do what's called a face joint. If you're not familiar, this is the side of the board. and this is the edge to get a square board, you have to prepare both, we are focusing on a face joint right now, it is our board, as you can see, we are just going to cut and leave a border on this side, so let's go Let's join this board and then I'll show you our previous tip and a tip with the planer on how to make this board perfectly square and flat so you can see here that the jointer left an edge, so what What we're going to do now is to mount this piece of wood to something that is perfectly flat like this MDF here and I'm going to use the exact same double sided tape trick that I just showed you, there we go, now these two are mounted. together, the next thing you need is a planer.

Something important to note is that I have a super wide planer, but if you only have a 12 inch planer, I will make sure the overall width of your board and sled are below any The width of your planer is most of pots today measure up to 13 inches. Now I'm going to run this through the planer, give me this flat side, now we just take it out, run it again and so you have a perfect flat board bonus tip the fourth tip or technique I

wish

I

knew

when I started was to use blue tape to help me with design.

If you've watched my content for a long time, you've probably seen me use blue tape. cutting dovetails and doing some basic carpentry, but this is like, I guess, I don't know one of the most abundant opportunities to use blue tape in the shop, let me show you some examples here, let's act like we want to cut a mortise. in this block here, if I were to do that, I would probably initially set the width of the block. Let's make our mortise about an inch on each side. Well, how long do we want it to be? Let's say what we will do. a three inch mortise, also what would be the next steps as a carpenter: you're going to want to go in with your marking gauge like this, set it on that line where you go in, mark it, turn the piece over, mark it and come back. that end marks that end and then you're going to go and start morting the material, but that's how I started to adapt and do it, I think it makes it a lot easier, you're going to do the same technique.

I'll go back and what I'll do is I'll put blue tape right on that line before I start cutting. I'll do the same thing on the other side and then I'll put a piece on this side. I don't care if it matches the line and a piece on this side and I'll come back with the same marking gauge. I'll mark that line. Mark that line now that we've established that we're going to have that line underneath. and we'll get it done from here and now what we have is a much clearer representation of where we're cutting the blue line.

There is a much bigger difference in wood. You can use whichever method you prefer if you want to take this. Out with the Forstner Bit with a router, you have seen me cut bow ties by hand on many of my jobs. I use exactly this same technique. It works amazing in this app. I highly suggest you get much cleaner results, but what if we want to? To cut a joint well, this is a good example. Let's say I want to cut a dovetail joint on this piece of wood and then rub it here to place my blue tape on the edge of this board where I'm going to cut. the lap joint more or less fitted, okay, in the center, we're going to measure an inch on each side, there we're going to engrave incredible, so this board is three inches wide.

I'm going to set the depth to two inches here now. I'm going to take my bevel gauge, I'm going to set it to 7 degrees, I'm going to come in here, you're going to take the same marking knife, now cut, come back to the other side, we have our point here and Our point here is fantastic, so always you want to leave the blue on the part that you're saving, so for me, what this has done is really changed my ability to visualize my joints because I'm going to remove the blue tape. So I can see the part I'm cutting perfectly, I can go back and make it perfect if I want.

Okay so come back here to get a joint pretty quick it's not that bad but let's say you have spaces like this because none of us are perfect so you're looking here and you're looking here but when I started I thought the only thing Solution for that was to be better or use wood filler, you don't need any wood filler. best option for gaps in glue UPS will just put a little glue on the joint which was an excessive amount of glue but I want you to be able to see it on camera unplug the dust hose and just sand it I use this technique on joints dovetail I literally used it on the three tier side table I built for the boxes, it just makes it look so much more perfect.

I

wish

I had known this when I started because it is such a simple solution, so easy and keeps the sand powder the same color as whatever you are working on now. I will recommend this if you are staining something, the glue will not stain so keep in mind I don't stain a lot of my furniture but This is an amazing way to build confidence in your hand cut woodwork at any of your woodworking shops. Also, if you have a gap in the table glue, try this trick, it's much better than using wood filler and while we're on the subject of sanding, here it is.

Two more additional

tips

for sanding first and foremost as a

beginner

. I was using my DeWalt random orbital sander and I was just using the bag that came attached. Ditch the bag and attach any type of vacuum or hose you can get your hands on. In it, you will remove surface residue and get much better and much more consistent results. Tip number two while sanding, get a light, this is just a job site light, and run it over the surface while sanding. What I'm going to do is show you the swirl marks because it's going to create lines.of shadow on what you are sanding.

It's something super simple. You can use a light like this. You can use a small flashlight that you pull out of your pocket if that's all you have. Make things like this for use on cars and in big box stores, but pretty much if you could shine a light on your work, it will show you swirl marks and give you a better chance of getting a better finish and that'll be it. In this I hope these

tips

are something you can use today to up your game when it comes to woodworking, let me know if you have any tips, leave them in the comments below and then tell me what we're going to build next.