Woodworker's Journal 2006-30-Winter, страница 10

A piloted flush-cutting bit and a notched template make hinge A shop-made tenoning jig offers multiple advantages: it stabilizes end

mortising a breeze with a router. The jig builds repeatability and cuts on long workpieces, improves accuracy and keeps your hands out

uniformity into the process. of harm's way. Nothing makes tenon-cutting easier.

nail to pivot the jig on one end and—voila! Perfect circles every time with a stone-simple jig. Need to rip a straight line across a sheet of plywood with a circular saw? It's tough to do guiding the tool by eye, but clamp a piece of flat-edged stock on top and suddenly your circular saw has a reference edge to follow. It will slice a line so straight you'll think you cut it with a laser.

Along the same lines, jigs make tasks repeatable. Henry Ford taught us that repeatability is the key to improving productivity. If you've got a kitchen's worth of cabinet doors to hang, a hinge-mortising jig and a router are hours faster than the sharpest chisel in even the most skilled hand, and each mortise will be identical, thanks to the jig. Same goes for drilling shelf pin holes. Rather than measure, mark and drill each hole separately, use a scrap of pegboard clamped to the cabinet wall for a drilling jig. No guesswork or

A jig doesn't have to be complex to be effective. Two scraps held together with hot-melt glue and stuck to a workpiece form an effective and safe way to secure odd-shaped stock for deep bandsaw cuts.

measurement errors to flub the process up. Your drill never measured so well.

Machine-made joinery is an exercise in futility unless each step of the machining process can be carefully controlled and repeated. All it takes is a registration pin mounted to a scrap wood fence on your table saw's miter gauge to create perfectly spaced pins and slots for finger joints. Attach a fence to a piece of plywood with a slot cut in the middle and suddenly you have a simple way to make router-cut mortises for mortise and tenon joints. In both cases, jigs limit the cutting path, which improves control and makes precise repetition possible.

Making Tools Work Even Harder

Aside from improving accuracy or building repeatability into the machining process, the right jig can squeeze every ounce of versatility from your tools. There's no denying that straight rip cuts are a table saw's bread and butter, but a shop-made tapering or panel-raising jig takes rip-cutting to a whole new level. Suddenly straight cuts aren't limited to workpieces laying flat or following the fence. You can even clamp a pair of fences at an angle to the blade to create a safe tunnel for milling cove moldings on a table saw. A little scrap turns a straight-cutting saw into a shaper.

In a sense, even router tables are really just oversized jigs that turn a handheld tool into a stationary machine. Here, a jig converts your router into a makeshift molding cutter, jointer and first-rate jointmaking tool. A similar bit of magic happens when you add a drum sanding station to your drill press: suddenly a hole-drilling machine morphs into a smoothing center, without taking an inch more floor space. It's sweet indeed when a few picks from the scrap bin or piece of old countertop can make a good machine even better.

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Workshop Projects