A kind reader tipped us off to this deal going on over at Woodcraft — they’re selling some of their router bits for $5 each! The sale price is good on nine different styles of 1/2″-shank, carbide-tipped router bits, including dovetail, cove, rabbet, vee, ogee, and others.
$5 Router Bits [Woodcraft]
R.J.R. Studios claims their SAND-FLEE portable drum sander is more versatile than an overhead drum sander, is easier to use than a belt sander, and gives you more control than an orbital sander. It also runs very clean, capturing most of the dust in its base even without a vacuum attached to its 2-1/2″ dust port.
The edge of regular sanding discs can dig into your prized work, but New Wave sanding discs have wavy edges that curl over the side of the sanding pad, so the edge doesn’t come in contact with the workpiece.
The selection of engineered building materials available to contractors and the general public gets bigger and better every year — there’s melamine, plywood, Baltic birch plywood, chipboard, MDO, MDF, particle board, phenolic, and more. One of the relative newcomers, phenolic-faced plywood looks to be a good combination of stability, strength, and water resistance.
Mobility and stability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Mount these heavy-duty casters from Woodcraft to your machine, and when you’re done moving it you can raise the machine off the caster and level it at the same time with the included wrench.
The casters attach to your machine with a four-hole plate, and they’re rated for 660 lbs apiece or 1,320 lbs spread between all four casters. Also, the feet are made of a material that reduces vibration, so your machine will be more stable under use.
A set of four casters runs $100 at Woodcraft.
Leveling Casters [Woodcraft]
Granite is becoming a popular material for the workshop. It’s dimensionally stable and corrosion-free, and its polished, slick surface makes it ideal for machine tables, but is it a good material for precision measuring tools? Steel City seems to think so — they’re selling an angle gauge made from it.
We’ve all seen magnetic catches on cabinets — you know, the kind where if you pull hard enough you overcome the magnetic force to open the door. But the bigger the door, the bigger the magnet needed to hold it closed and the harder you have to yank the door to get it open. Using their switchable magnets, Magswitch has come up with a way to hold doors securely yet let them open easily without having to pull so hard.
The Gauge-It lets you easily and accurately measure blade height and angle on your table saw. It compensates for blade teeth to give you accurate measurements, and the spring-loaded armature moves with your blade, indicating the exact angle.
When you buy Carter’s MAGFENCE, you can just use it: there are no extra parts to buy, no assembly required — just stick the magnetic fence onto your steel or cast iron table without special mounting hardware. What makes it really unique is you can also attach it to the side of the table for an instant aluminum extension.
When cutting crown molding, you’ve usually got two choices: 1) Calculate the compound angle and actually use your compound miter saw to its full potential, or 2) cut it upside down and backwards. Both of these non-intuitive methods can lead to expensive mistakes. Screw that — why not use a jig like Milescraft’s Crown45 that lets you cut the the crown molding just like you’ll put it up on the wall?
If your router puts up a fight every time you change bits, try a chuck eliminator. Legacy Woodworking offers two versions, labeled as the Bosch version and the Porter Cable version. Either of them should help eliminate the whole juggling act with two wrenches, and the related cussing. Even though they look the same, the Porter Cable version supposedly allows you to change router bits in ten seconds without knuckle scrapes.
JessEm’s Zip Slot Mortise Mill transforms your hand drill into a machine for creating loose tenon joints. Cutting two mortises and using a loose tenon can speed up joinery significantly, because you only need to do one operation multiple times, rather than the three or four operations required with traditional mortise and tenon joints.
Whenever I hear the words “safety” and “gloves” together, I either flash back to high school PSA’s, or I feel a distinct urge to dig out my old Men Without Hats album. These safety gloves aren’t Thriller-style or anything as sexy as all that — they will help you to not remove pieces of your fingers with a whittling knife, though.
The crack-smoking price on Woodcraft’s high-speed steel turning sets has come down $50 for the month of October. If you were looking at taking the plunge on a five-piece or eight-piece set then this might be the time. Apparently no one else could justify $140 for them either.
Burn decorative rings or bands into your wood turnings with KC wire burners. Hold the wire against the work while turning and the friction of the wire against the wood burns a crisp black line into the work. It’s completely normal to see a little bit of smoke as the tools are working, but you should probably stop if you see flames!
Kreg isn’t making a big production about changing the grips on the clamps in their pocket hole tool line, but you can pre-order the improved clamps to be shipped this week from Woodcraft and next week from McFeely’s.
Except for their new corner clamps, Kreg is adding comfort grips to all the clamps in their pocket hole tool line — that includes their bench clamps, right-angle clamps, and face clamps. Since there’s no press release, we scraped this information together from other sources, and we haven’t run across the reason for the upgrade. Is it a ploy to further differentiate their products, or are they doing it in response to customer feedback?
It looks like the new clamps will be priced similarly to the older versions, but we found a few cases, like the right-angle clamp, where they bumped the retail price up a few dollars.
Pocket Hole Tools [Kreg]
New Kreg Clamps [McFeely's]
New Kreg Face Clamps [Woodcraft]
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