Cleaning my Dust Collector’s Canister Filter
The first sign that there was a problem was that my jointer kept clogging up my pipes. Chips started ejecting from the cutter head instead of disappearing neatly into the plumbing. Planing a stack of maple boards for some cabinet doors was becoming an exercise in frustration. Plane a board, unclog the dust collector. Plane …
Bench Dogs with Teeth
My workbench has 3/4″ round dog holes for surface clamping with my Veritas Twin Screw end vise. Most of the time, I use short lengths of store-bought hard wood dowel as dogs. This approach has been a little frustrating because with no spring to hold the dowels at a particular height before clamping pressure is …
Installing a Cast Iron Router Wing in my Ridgid TS3650
General International offers these cast iron router tables that happen to also fit as table saw wings. Their website doesn’t really have much/any info about it as I write this – it’s linked as an accessory to a router table package. When I was at the Hamilton Woodworking Show back in January, I saw one …
Upgrading a Delta 50-760 Dust Collector with a Canister Filter
Dust collection seems to get people riled up for some reason. I haven’t a clue why. Searching forums and websites about it will reveal dozens of conflicting reports, differing opinions, information and misinformation. After spending all together too much time wading through all that stuff trying to find the useful ideas, I’ve come to the …
Bench Stand-offs
Lee Valley recently started offering a non-slip pad material in 1″, 2″ and puck-sized self-adhesive discs. They even sell the pucks. Well… if you’re on the fence about these, don’t give it a second thought. What a useful product! I got a package of the 2″ discs and stuck them to some roughly 2″ discs …
Flip Top Tool Cart
My shop’s small. Real small. It’s so small that once, I actually moved a power outlet to reclaim a square foot of wall space to hang something on. So when it comes to making use of space, I’m really careful to protect my ability to move around. Everything in my shop is on wheels of …
Quick and Dirty Router Circle Jig
I needed to cut some fairly accurate circular holes and arcs in some 0.220″ acrylic sheet and MDF. Ordinarily, I’d use my bandsaw circle cutting jig to cut arcs and circles, but in this case, the waste piece was the disc in the centre and the ring left behind was the part I wanted, which …
Sharpening an Oval Skew without creating facets
I have a couple of oval skew turning chisels. A lot of the comments I’ve seen about oval skews indicate that a major flaw with them is that they’re quite difficult to sharpen. My skills at the grinder leave much to be desired, so I did some digging on various forums to try and find …
Shop Electrical
So I was completely fed up with tripping over extension cords and spending almost as much time plugging in and unplugging machines as using them. When I started, I had 2 duplex outlets on the same circuit as the lights in my space. I put up with that for quite a while, but I reached …
A Little Tool Cabinet
I built this tool cabinet to replace a 4′ square of pegboard that I had screwed to the wall. Originally, I had my workbench in that space and it made sense that the pegboard would be there to hold all my most used tools. When I moved my bench, that particular pegboard was more or …