To drill angled holes, you can tilt your drill press table, but sometimes it’s easier and more precise to use a cradle-style angle vise instead. The head of this particular vise from Palmgren locks at preset stops every 15° from 0° to 90°, simply by inserting an alignment pin. Set any other angle by removing the alignment pin and hand-tightening the locking mechanism.
No, the WASP Sander isn’t designed for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants — it’s an innovative attachment for your drill press. This tool turns your drill press into a belt sander, a drum sander, a floppy belt sander, a flat belt sander, or a curved belt sander, depending on how you configure it.
If you ever need to bend a piece of metal, to make a clamp, for instance, you can achieve a somewhat-functional bend with a vise and pliers — but it takes too long and looks like crap. A better solution, the Veritas metal bender slips over most bench vise jaws to create bends between 180° and 90°.
If you want a power tool in a color other than Delta gray, Jet white, Ridgid orange, or Hitachi “aggressive” green, WoodWerks can help. They’re selling the Powermatic PM2000 cabinet saw with options that include not only custom paint, but custom knobs and a custom name plate. And the PM2000 won Fine Woodworking’s Editor’s Choice for Cabinet Saw in 2006 — so you know your saw’s beauty is more than skin-deep.
These sockets work where deep sockets just aren’t deep enough. Kobalt’s Thru-Ratchet sockets and ratchets are hollow down the center, so they can fit over any length of bolt. In a lot of cases you could get the same performance out of your ratcheting wrenches, but this system allows you to get into deep recesses that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Thru-Ratchet sockets plug right in to the ratchet handle, instead of attaching to a square drive. Integrating into the handle reduces overall height by up to fifty percent over a standard ratchet and socket — which is good for areas with low clearance.
Just like your high-school wood shop teacher taught you: the table saw must be respected, because a moment of inattention can lead to a serious injury — unless you’re cutting with a SawStop. The SawStop employs sophisticated electronics to detect the difference between wood, flesh, and, apparently, hot dogs — and it turns what could be a serious injury into a nick or a cut.
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A bull pin has nothing to do with baseball — that would be a bull pen — except possibly being involved in the construction of the stadium. But you probably want it on deck when you’re bolting metal structures together. You use a bull pin to align holes, so you can bolt parts together — you just drive the pin’s tapered shaft into the hole.
Congratulations, everyone! Our tools now come equipped with laser beams — we’re officially in the future. Many drill presses, circ-saws, miter saws, and even some wacky hand tools now feature lasers for precision work. It seems manufacturers are anxious to put as many laser beams on their products as possible. I’m sure we’ll see a hammer that shines a laser on the head of a nail by year’s end. But do these high-tech beams of light really help?
I recently acquired a jigsaw that had a laser on it. I thought is was a bit weird, since lasers shoot straight and jigsaws are meant to cut curves — but I tried it out. Although it seemed to work at first, I wound up watching the laser instead of the blade, and my cut started to wander.
My Ryobi drill press also sports a laser. Although the laser crosshairs can be useful, I have to realign it almost every time I use the darn thing. On the other hand, I used to cut granite commercially on a large wet-saw, and my cuts would’ve been horrible had I not had a laser to align them.
So, are laser alignments hot or not? Do you have a tool with a laser? Which one? Do you use the laser, or does it just get in the way? Let us know in comments!
Saws With Lasers [Google Products]
Drills With Lasers [Google Products]
Sean posted about Bench Dog’s ProMax Cabinet back in 2006, and now in 2008, for a limited time, Amazon is listing the Bench Dog ProMax Complete Router Table System with free shipping for $970. This “system” — really the whole kit and kaboodle for routing — includes the ProMax cabinet, ProMax router table, ProFence, cast iron end cap, Porter Cable router, and four Cab-Loc casters.
The cabinet features integrated router bit storage, pull-out shelves and flip-up doors, and a lower cubby for router storage. Bench Dog makes the cabinet with bolt and cross dowel construction, birch plywood side panels, and steel hardware for vibration dampening.
Promax Complete [Bench Dog]
Via Amazon
Street Pricing [Google Products]
We like the new Milwaukee 0880-20 28V wet/dry vac if for no other reason than it looks like a toolbox — so we’ll probably be able to manage it more easily than the normal, R2-D2 looking vacs on the market. Oh yeah, it also features a two-gallon capacity and an airflow rating of 45 cfm.
According to Milwaukee, the 0880-20’s V28TM lithium-ion batteries will power the vac continuously for around 16 minutes on one charge. With more air power and suction than its 18V predecessor, it’ll quickly and easily remove dust, debris, and water.
Changing bits in a table-mounted router can be awkward, unless you have a router lift that raises the collet above the table. If you’re not lucky enough to have one of those lifts, you can try to work underneath the table, or you can remove the router from the table every time you want to change bits. Or you could just get a bent or offset router wrench — it allows you to access the collet without removing your router from the table.
The drill press might be one of the more overlooked shop tools when it comes to dust collection, but it still can make quite a mess — especially if it gets dual use as a drum sander. The dust and shavings also make it hard to see your workpiece while drilling. Peachtree Woodworking Supply sells one solution: a versatile kit that makes collecting dust at the drill press easy.
For all the readers that hated the Saw-Aid — and those that might actually have liked it — here’s another tool from Stots: the Dust Sucker And More!, hereafter shortened to “the Dust Sucker”. The Dust Sucker aims to make dust collection on your router table more effective. At the same time it provides a starting pin for fenceless routing, and it gives you a convenient place to store the things you always want close at hand, like router bits, a collet wrench, or brass setup bars.
We’ve covered tools to help collect sawdust from your miter saw here, but this model from FastCap collapses for portability and easy storage. The ChopShop saw hood keeps your work area cleaner by catching the sawdust that sprays behind your saw. When working outside, the saw hood can also help protect your equipment from the elements.
If ever there was “One Shop Tool to Rule Them All”, it might be the Saw-Aid. Let’s list the functions:
I count eight tools in one. I’m not sure I’d replace my steel rule or brass setup bars with the Saw-Aid, but it looks like a great tool to have by your table saw or to throw in your go bag or toolbox. You can find the Saw-Aid at many woodworking retailers for between $15 and $17.
Our question to you: Is it worth it? Is this something you would use in your shop, or is it something you get as a Father’s Day gift, that sits on your shelf collecting dust? Let us know in comments.
Saw-Aid [Stots Corporation]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon
Sometimes simple tools make our lives easier, like this bench stop from Big Horn. It sits flush in a mortise on your bench top and pops up when you need a stop. Sure, you could use a bench dog — but when you’re planing or sanding, it’s handy to have a stop that doesn’t extend past the top of the board.
Until recently, if you wanted a CNC machine you had two choices: buy one online, or build one yourself. Today, a guy can actually go to the store and buy a CNC machine. Sears was the first big retailer to start selling a CNC machine — the CarveWright — and WoodCraft shortly followed suit. Now Rockler has announced they’ll be offering the CNC Shark. What’s more, supposedly you can watch live demos at your local Rockler.
The CNC Shark can route wood, engrave or cut plastic, and etch or cut tile. Constructed from steel, aluminum, and HDPE, the Shark’s X and Y axes can travel 24″ and 13″ respectively, while the Z or vertical axis can travel 4-1/2″. It also moves pretty fast — 120 inches per minute or more — and it moves precisely in increments as small as 0.0000625″. A 269 oz/in stepper drives each axis. And each axis also utilizes four precision linear bearing guides for rigidity. A Bosch Colt palm router mounted to the Shark supplies the cutting power.
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