Are Woodpeckers Tool Worth the $$$?, Router Fence Woes, Grain Direction and MORE!!!

This Episodes Questions:

Brians Questions:

I am making a toy box for my grandson out of white oak. The dimensions will be 38” width, 18” depth, and 30” high. The front will be 4/4 quarter sawn, while the back and sides will be 4/4 flat sawn lumber. I plan to attach the front and sides, and the back and sides via dovetails. Since quarter sawn wood will move less than flat sawn, should I be concerned about the wood moving at different ratios?  Also, can you recommend hinges that will prevent the top of the toy box from crashing down on my grandson’s fingers?

Mike

My question concerns the router table that I built myself out of out of MDF and 2x4s last year. I'm pretty satisfied with it overall. I am by no means an expert, but I'd have to say having the router in a table seems to be roughly 1,000% more effective than using the router freehand.

Having said that, I've been struggling with the fence, especially When I'm trying to edge join a board. My approach for securing the fence has been to clamp down each end of it with a trigger clamp, placing an additional clamp on the support frame or what have you at the rear of the router table. I've included a picture of my setup for this as well for clarity's sake.

Here's the problem I'm running into: I position the fence, clamp it down, then check it again to make sure it hasn't come out of alignment. When I initially begin running boards over the router table, it works great. However, before too long, sometimes as soon as the second board, I find the fence is no longer properly aligned. When I check it I always find that the fence has shifted back towards the far end of the router table, usually by a 32nd of an inch or so. As you are all aware, this small difference has a pretty significant impact on how my boards come out, particularly when edge joining.

My assumption is that this shift is due to my exerting pressure against the fence while feeding material through to keep the work piece tight against it. Do any of you have any suggestions regarding how I can secure my fence more effectively? Part of me wonders if I am just applying too much sideways pressure to my work pieces, but I also feel like I am applying just enough pressure to keep it from wandering away from the fence when passing the bit. Zach Owens

Guy's Questions:

I'd also like to hear about your process for organizing your shop space and how often you revisit the layout of your shop.

As a follow-up to each question, I'd be curious if organizing and maintaining a shop are aspects of woodworking that you enjoy? Or loathe? Or maybe just tolerate?
Marc

I think there is a good question about red vs blue. red corner is woodpeckers, the YouTube influencers certified measuring and layout tools. Then there’s the poor humans with affordable blue corner igaging. I believe woodpeckers is rated in their accuracy to .002 inch and igaging is .002 inch. So, I wonder if that .001 would make my skills somehow greater?? I think honestly that having a set of tools that I can use without each being a different measurement, as tape measures often would be. I also think about cost, even with a higher shipping fee due to my location I nearly outfitted my shop with all the marking and measuring tools at roughly $300 instead of $300 for one ruler or square.
Thanks for the ongoing pod cast hope you all have a great year. Paul Mitchell

Huy's Questions:

 On the face of wood, there is clearly a right and wrong direction to plane. Going the wrong direction causes gouging, chipping, and/or a time tough pushing the plane across the wood. How do you tell the correct direction to go with the plane, without having to risk messing up the piece by potentially going the wrong direction across the face of the wood with your plane? George

 I just made my first attempt at cutting dovetails for a small box with dividers that my wife asked me to make her for work. I cut them using a router table that I made just for the occasion. It went fairly well, meaning that they all fit and there aren't any unsightly large gaps. Starting with test pieces was definitely the way to go.

I did have one issue, however. I'm not sure what the appropriate name for the different pieces of a dovetail are, but when I was cutting the female pieces I kept running into an issue where the router bit would jerk the work piece away from the fence, resulting in a somewhat crooked portion in my otherwise straight dovetail cut. I tried feeding the work piece into the bit from each side to see if one direction worked better than the other, but that didn't seem to help. I know that typically the recommendation is to make several shallow passes, but obviously this is not possible with a dovetail. Do you have any guesses as to what I might have been doing wrong? Should I have been pushing the work piece more firmly against the fence? Thanks in advance for your answers and insight. Can't wait to hear your next episode.

Sincerely,Z achary T Owens