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"Veritas"
Removing a stripped screw or a drywall screw that missed the stud can be a trial — you try to back the screw out with a screwdriver, you almost get it, but it slips back into the hole again. Sometimes you can grab the deviant screw with your fingers or a set of pliers, but Lee Valley sells a tool designed especially for removing stripped screws.
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Blind or “sliver” nailing is an old technique of hiding nail heads in finish carpentry. You raise a thin sliver of wood, leaving it attached; drive a nail, and set it in the depression left behind; and glue the sliver back into place — no filler needed. Lee Valley designed a modern tool to help make this antique practice a bit easier.
Made of stainless steel and brass, the specialized plane clamps a 1/4″ high-carbon steel chisel at a 15° angle. The gouge-shaped edges of the hardwood-handled chisel minimize tear-out and leave a clean shaving. To change the thickness of the shaving, just adjust how far the chisel protrudes from the sole of the plane.
Along with the non-marring plane and the chisel, the Veritas Invisible Nailing kit includes a small container of fish glue. For only $28, this kit’ll help you lend an air of professionalism to your woodworking projects .
Note: Check out page 432 of Woodworking for Beginners: A Manual for Amateurs By Charles Gardner Wheeler at Google Books for a 100-year-old description of “sliver” nailing. While you’re at it, take a look at some of the other great woodworking techniques from 1907 that this great, public-domain book describes.
Invisible Nailing Kit [Veritas]
Invisible Nailing Kit [Lee Valley]
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°.
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Although plumb bobs have been in use for thousands of years, Lee Valley thinks they can make this old standard a little better with their patented Veritas Flat Bob. Is it any better, or are they blowing smoke up your ass to try to get you to part with some more of your hard-earned money? Read on, and decide for yourself.
When you first look at the flat bob, it doesn’t look like most plumb bobs. Lee Valley manufactures the 3-3/4″ plummet from precision-molded nylon and adds a brass weight, tip, and string holder. They designed the flat weight to slide against a wall instead of rolling like a normal plummet, so it stabilizes quickly. The marking slot in the plummet serves two purposes: it’s directly in line with the string, so your lines are dead-on plumb; and the cord windlass snaps into the slot for storage.
The flat bob comes with a protective tip cover, 8′ of braided nylon cord wrapped around the windlass, and the 70g plummet. If you inhaled the smoke, you’ll be happy to find out it only runs $19 at Lee Valley.
Most woodworking workbenches make some provision for bench dogs — and if they don’t, a few minutes with a 3/4″ drill bit can fix that oversight. You can use the holes not only for bench dogs, but also for hold-downs and other specialized clamps, such as this very well thought-out and elegant clamp from Veritas.
You can clamp materials as thick as 3-3/4″ with this brass, steel, and anodized aluminum clamp. A brass knob on the top of the clamp post controls the simple wedging mechanism, which makes inserting and removing the clamp quick and easy.
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Do you ever feel like your carpenter’s square isn’t the precision instrument it could be? It won’t work well on materials with profiled edges, and sometimes you feel like you need three hands to use it. The Veritas square fence can solve these problems. You can attach it to either leg of your carpenter’s square, and now, because the square is resting on the workpiece, it doesn’t need to be supported.
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In a world where power tools dominate most shops, hand tools can still help us out. For instance, a cornering tool, beautiful in its simplicity, does the same job as a router round-over bit, but it does it with no setup, sawdust, or noise. A cornering tool can actually cut a cleaner radius, without the machining marks you get with a spinning router bit.
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Setting up a table saw for basic cuts is a challenge for many DIYers, and setting up the cuts required to form a pentagon or hexagon can be downright impossible — unless you happen to have this layout guide from Veritas. It looks like a hexagon deformed from a bad fall, but each corner represents the angle required to form a particular shape, either four, five, six, eight, or even twelve-sided.
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