Tips and Tricks Archives:
Gutter Vines
We are working on this customers deck in Reading. They have grown vines on their gutters and downspouts. Where growing vines and anything that brings a lot of moisture towards wood is not a favorable combination, with this work around, you can keep all the moisture away from the wood by growing the vines around the aluminum gutters. We simply tied the gutter off out of the way and slide it right back into place when finished with the deck. Great look while minimizing damage!
Kreg Cabinet Door Hinge Jig
If you have a couple of cabinet doors to drill holes for this jig works just fine. It requires a few minutes of layout for each hole, unlike some of the more expensive cabinet hardware jigs, which take any measurement needed out of the equation. Long story short- a door or two great product that gets the job done, but if your looking to make an entire kitchens cabinet doors, you may be better off with a more advanced jig that you can set up once and then forget about it and simply hold up to each door and drill.
This post will also appear in the product review archives page. There will be some crossover between archive posts as you will see as some posts can fit equally well in each.
Post Cap Design
Using some 8/4 (2” thick) pine stock we were able to quickly make a few post caps for some odd sized porch posts. Sometimes you cant buy everything you need from the lumber yard and being able to set up and make things in our shop enables us to create a much better finished product in a much more timely manner.
All we needed to make these posts, which the finished product can be found on our design page, was a table saw, router table and two different moulding router bits. One was a Freud raised panel cabinet door bit and the other a CMT OG edge moulding bit.
Fireplace Wood Framing
Always make sure to leave all openings needed for electrical boxes and wires… but it is always a good idea to add extra blocking wherever you need to hang anything. Here you can see we added plenty of blocking for adjustments to mantel height as well as additional blocking to accommodate a number of different tv mounting brackets.
Self Centering Dowel Jig for Floating Shelves
This jig is designed for using dowels to line up joinery. It works perfectly for the holes needed for the floating shelves shared yesterday. In addition to having a deep steel guide for a perfectly plumb hole to accommodate a nice straight shelf, it’s self centering feature also makes layout fool proof. Simply tighten down the crank knob to center the plate on the back side of your shelf. There are 6 different hole sizes on the jig to accommodate different dowel sizes. In our case we use the 7/16” floating shelf pins so all that is left is drilling that hole the correct depth and installation. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or have another way you do a similar task!