The Jig is up

    It is that time of the year for me when it becomes necessary to shift shop space.    Last spring when the weather turned nice I moved my shop work area from the basement to one of the bays in the garage.   The wife's car continued to be sheltered at night while the old black pickup of mine sat out in the sun, rain, and wind.    Being outside was a little rough on the old Ford.   The black beast and I went for a ride to the used car lot to see if maybe it was time to trade up.    That was a shocker.   I decided to keep trucking with what I have.   The other day I gave old blackie a bath and put a little wax on him trying to make him shinny again.    Eventually,  we got the shine back and he is now looking pretty good for an old beater.   So now I'm in the phase of emptying out that side of the garage and moving my tools down to the room in the basement that I have for my winter shop.   (It is also the room where we keep the cat litter box...   Great.)

  This week I am going to share some of the shop jigs that I have fixed up.   Best description that I can give for a "jig" is something that you rig up to help you do something around the shop.   It is something that you can make without spending a lot of money to buy an expensive tool that can do the same thing.      On the picture to the left you can see that I put some wheels on the end of  my shop vac floor sweeper.    Those wheels help the vac run over the floor a little quicker and they also keep the vacuum from sucking down and sticking to the floor.    The wheels just hold the vac off the floor enough to let a little air pass through and saw dust and chips just disappear.

   To the right are some of the push blocks that I have made up.    I use these push blocks when I am running boards through either the jointer or the table saw.    I can get up right next to the blade using one of these.     They allow me to hold the wood down tight to the saw and keep my fingers out of the way.   Sometimes on small pieces as I push wood through the table saw, I hold the wood in place and just saw through the bottom of the block.    It's easy to just make another push block.

.    
  When gluing up joints on the shoe box project that I was doing last week, I ran into a problem with not owning any clamps that were over four foot long.  I did have some four footers, but this project was a little over 50 inches long.   So what I did was take some scrap plywood lumber and drill holes on each end.    I used that piece of scrap and two shorter clamps.   There is one on each side.    It worked well.  

    The list could go on and on as my jig pile is almost as big as my scrap wood pile.   Some jigs I have used over and over and some jigs I may use just once.    In any case, jigs are a big help in the shop.    (Better than a crabby cat.)     They help keep you safe, they help keep you accurate, and they generally do not cost a lot to make.