Woodworking Tricks You'll Actually Use // Helpful Woodworking Hints

Welcome to another video. This one is all for you guys. You asked for another tips and tricks video and by golly, you're gonna get one. So watch the video. You might already know these things. I don't know, I don't know what you know. I'm not you, but you might learn something. So follow along, subscribe down below, go follow me over on Instagram. You can follow me on Facebook if you're an old person. And yeah, let's do this. Let's talk about sanding. Everybody hates sanding, but you don't have to. No, you do. But the only thing that makes sanding more horrible is when you don't really know how to do it properly. Now I'm not saying this is the only way to sand, but this is how I sand and I manage to get good finishes, so there might be something to it. This is my process. I like to start at 80 grit every single time. No matter how clean the wood is. And I work my way from 80 grit to 120, to 150, to 220. Now, I don't finish my pieces at 220 because I use Rubio Monocoat and they say not to go that high. So I usually finish them at 150. But I go up to 220 with my random orbit sander and then I come back to 150 by hand. Why do I do this? Well, I don't trust the random orbit sander to get a perfect finish without leaving swirl marks. So the only thing that I trust is my own fingers. So I go up to 220 on the random orbit and then I go over the whole thing again by hand with 150. Now, if you're gonna hand sand it all, I highly recommend you get one of these little doohickeys. It's a little hook and latch hand sanding block and it just takes a little sanding disc, it hooks right on there, voila, and then you can sand away. I'll put a link to one of these in the video description. Now, there's some other things you wanna consider when sanding a piece to make it go a lot better. And here's what you wanna do. A big mistake that people make when they're sanding is they'll sand a board with their power sander and they'll start at, let's say, 80 grit and then they'll finish the 80 grit, they'll take off the 80 grit, slap on the 120 and they'll just start sanding. The problem with this is once you sand a board, you create a lot of fine dust that remains on the board. Now, if you immediately just throw on another pad and start sanding, you're taking all that fine dust and you're grinding it into the surface of your board. This can cause a lot more swirl marks and scratches that are gonna show up in your finished piece. So what you wanna do is in between each one of your grits, you wanna clean off your board. Now, you can just blow it off, that's fine. Wipe it down with a rag, that's great. The best thing to do is to wipe the whole thing down with mineral spirits, that gets rid of all the dust. I understand this can take a little bit of time and slow you down, but you get a really nice finish. Do it in between each grit and then you're not grinding all that fine dust into your board. Sandpaper's flippin' expensive, let's just be honest. And if you throw out your sanding disc every time it gets a little dirt on there, then you're gonna just spend a ton of money and you're not gonna make any money. And we all like making money. So, here's a trick that you can use to make your sanding pads go way farther. Now, they make these little eraser things. Everyone thinks about these for the drum sander or the belt sander, but no one thinks to flip and use these on your random orbit sander. It works exactly the same way. Just clean it off, this will make each one of your sanding discs go like three or four times further and you don't have to throw them all away. I just tossed them in the trash for years, I started doing this, and now when it gets all clogged up, pull this out, clean it off, keep going. I can do an entire tabletop with one sanding disc and I'm rich now. Not really, but I am saving more money. Let's talk about something else. Pallets. If you're working with pallets, these things can be a pain to de-nail. But I found a quick, easy solution to get all the nails out and you're not even gonna break a sweat. But for this, we have to go outside. We're just gonna let this burn a while and then after the wood's all gone, we'll come back and we'll sort through and we'll just pick up all the nails. It's that easy. Now, I'm gonna show you how to do this. Let's make drilling holes more fun. Drilling holes. It seems like a really simple thing, not that hard to screw up. Why do people screw it up all the time? Maybe it's because they don't know the proper way to drill a hole. Now, here's some helpful little tricks that make drilling holes a lot easier. Well, not easier, it'll just make your hole not look like crap. Let's talk about drill bits with spurs on them. Now, when I say spurs, this is what I mean. I mean drill bits like this brad point bit, here's a Forstner bit and a paddle bit. These are the most common ones with spurs. And the spurs are these little tabs that stick out on the side. They also generally have this brad point in the middle. Now, the brad point is very useful for alignment. You can stick that point right on wherever you wanna drill your hole and it ensures that your drill bit's not gonna wander around. What a lot of people don't realize is that these spurs are also designed to give you a nice, clean cut on the perimeter of your hole. But it's not as simple as just sticking it in there, turning your drill on and drilling. What you actually wanna do is turn your drill on in reverse. Cutting backwards will actually make a nice, clean perimeter and then once you score out that perimeter, flip it forward and then drill your hole and you'll get a crisp, clean cut all the way around your drilled hole. I'll show you, watch. And it's perfect because the reverse cuts in one direction. You might get a few little burrs and then you flip it in forward and it trims off all those burrs, leaving a perfect hole every single time. Now you know. But what happens if you drill one hole and then all of a sudden you realize, oh no, I made a mistake. That was the wrong size hole. It's supposed to be bigger. Well, you try and switch out your drill bit for the bigger size. Now you've got no place to reference your drill bit to drill a perfect hole. So you can try and just stick it on there and eyeball it and force it, but since it's not starting on that brad tip, chances are it's gonna bounce all over the place and you're not gonna have a clean, crisp hole. So what do you do? Here's what you do. You take a scrap piece of wood. This is just half inch MDF. You take your bigger size bit that you need to drill the hole bigger to and you drill a hole in it. See, just like that. Then you take that board, you stick it over your already drilled hole. You get it lined up perfect where it's supposed to be and you clamp it down. Then all you gotta do is insert your drill bit. This is gonna act as a guide now to keep your bit from bouncing all over the place and you drill your hole like this. So there's some simple drilling tricks that should help you out. There's a bunch of other ones too. Obviously, if you don't wanna get blowout on one side that you're drilling through, put a backer plate on and drill into the backer. If you can't put a backer plate on something, you can always drill a small pilot hole and then come in halfway through on one side, come in halfway through on the other side and meet in the middle. This will eliminate blowout altogether, but that's probably enough for drilling for today. Let's talk about gluing. Glue, it can be your best friend and your worst friend. It can be your best friend because you stick it onto two boards and then boom, the boards are mated for life. It's great when you're woodworking. It can be your worst friend because stain and finish does not take too kindly to glue. Now, it was a few years ago that I first learned that you can make your own wood filler by mixing glue and fine sawdust of whatever species you might be working with, mix it together into a paste, and you can fill little imperfections or cracks. This is great and it matches really well to the piece you're doing. What's not great about this is that stain and finish don't take too well to glue. So if you fill a crack with that glue and sawdust mixture and then you put stain over the top, there's a really good chance that wherever you filled is actually gonna be highlighted even more because that glue is not gonna take that stain or finish. And then I had an epiphany. Is that the right word, epiphany? Yeah, I had an idea and it worked really well. I used to finish a lot of my pieces with shellac or lacquer or varnish or wipe-on polyurethane. And then I had this idea of instead of using wood glue to mix with my sawdust and make my wood filler for tiny cracks and imperfections, I just started using whatever finish I might be putting over the top. Now, let me preface this with this does not work with oil-based finishes because they're not gonna harden. But anything that will actually harden up like a glue would, you can mix wipe-on poly, lacquer, varnish with a little bit of that sawdust, make a paste. If you're using lacquer or varnish, you gotta work really quick because it dries really fast. Use that to fill your cracks. And then when it comes time to finish, because it's already mixed with finish, you're not gonna have those highlighted glue seams or stand out middle fingers of glue. Let's talk about glue squeeze out. I get asked a lot, what do I do about glue squeeze out? Specifically in tight corners where sanding is gonna be a pain in the butt. I don't do anything. I literally, I just let it squeeze out and don't do anything. Not forever, but for the time being. What everybody wants to do when they see squeeze out is go get a rag and wipe it off. The problem with this is, as soon as you start wiping that wet glue, you're gonna smear it all around into the pores of that wood, and you're not gonna be able to get all that glue cleaned up so you're gonna actually make a bigger problem and a bigger sanding catastrophe that you're gonna have to deal with later. So what I like to do is just leave the glue alone, let it harden up, do its thing, and after it's hard and dry, I'll come back and I'll clean it up with a chisel. Now, some people, they'll take a straw and they might run it along the edge. You might've seen that trick. But even that is gonna smear that glue around and make a bigger problem. Let me show you what it looks like to just easily clean up that squeeze out with a chisel after it's dry. Okay, check this out. Now that we've let this dry and we've essentially contained the area that the glue's in, it's not smeared all over the place. You can just take a chisel and with a flat side just directly against the wood so it's nice and flush, what you're gonna do is you're gonna just come in here and you're just gonna trim up all that squeeze out like this. Now, this isn't quite dry. I didn't wait long enough. But it'll still work to show you. Do it on one side and then you do it on the other side just like that. Now, every once in a while, you'll get a board with a crack in it. Now, in an ideal world, you just cut that crack out and use the rest of the wood. But sometimes you can't. Sometimes you need all of that wood. Or sometimes a crack develops in an existing piece and you have to repair it. And the trick is how do you get enough glue into that crack to get some clamps on and know that it's gonna hold? Well, there's two ways that I know of to get glue inside of a crack. Let me show you what they are and you can decide which one's best. This is method number one and my preferred method. You just take some glue and you run it on the top of the crack like this, okay? You want plenty of glue because you wanna make sure you get enough glue in that crack. Then, you're gonna take your shop vac and you're gonna turn it on and hold it to the bottom of that board and suck that glue in. Now, you know when you pinch that together, that crack is full of glue and you're ready to go. Let me show you method number two. Method number two, we're gonna do the opposite of sucking the glue in from the bottom. We're actually gonna blow it in from the top. So what you're gonna do is take your glue bottle, get some glue in your mouth like this, put your mouth over the crack and just blow it in there. You might be able to see why I like method number one better. Let's end off with some measuring tips. All right, in my last video showing you how I built the built-in bench in my mudroom, I showed you a little trick for measuring when you have to measure in a corner or up against something because we all know that you get to this point where your tape measure's all bent, funky dory like that and you end up having to kind of guess what the actual measurement is. Now, my preferred method for dealing with this is to measure from that corner out a set distance. I always go one foot and then I measure from the other end to that mark and add on one foot. That gets me a perfect, accurate measurement. But a lot of you guys in the comments said another suggestion that I actually didn't know and you can also do. On the back of your tape measure, it says the size that your actual tape measure body is. On this one, it says two and three quarters of an inch. So potentially, you could go all the way with your tape measure touching that wall, find your measurement here at the mouth of the tape measure, add that two and three quarter inch and get your total length. I don't really like this because it's kind of hard to see exactly what the measurement at the mouth of the tape measure is. It's hard to get your tape measure perfect up against your wall that you're measuring off of. So I'm still gonna use my measuring out and to that mark, but you can do either one of these. Finding the center of a board, for some reason, is still a problem that we're talking about in 2020. To the point that companies have even made special jigs that will just perfectly find the center of a board for you. I think this is crazy because it's ridiculously easy and all you need is a ruler. No, I'm not just saying to measure the center of a board. Using a ruler, you can accurately find the center of any board with very, very little math. Let me show you how you do it. All you need to do is take your ruler. You're going to turn it at a diagonal like this and pick two points. Just go on the inch because it'll be a lot easier. I'm picking the six inch mark over here and to make it simple on myself, I'm gonna pick the 16 inch mark over on this side. You get that 16 perfectly on the edge over here, the six perfectly on the edge over here. I know that is a span of exactly 10 inches. What is half of 10 inches? Well, that would be five. So I go five inches in from either side and I make a mark. Boom, that is the center of my board. Now, aren't you glad you didn't buy a silly jig? All right, that's all I have time for today. Like always, if you liked this video, let me know down in the comments and subscribe. Go follow me on Instagram and if you're an old person, follow me on Facebook. Also, if you have some helpful tips and tricks that you think the world needs to know about, well, put them in the comments and I'll steal them from you and claim them as my own in my next video. Not really, I'll try and give you credit.