This week, seven projects worth sharing — proof that the best fix is often already sitting on the bench.
A Unique Way to Shape Wood with a Jigsaw Blade
This simple jig combines a jigsaw blade with a drill press to shape square stock into round dowels of different thicknesses. The best part is that you can freely adjust the finished diameter just by changing the blade's position. It's not a conventional method, but it's a simple and interesting way to explore what a drill press can do.
Without a lathe, making round dowels can be tricky — but with this method, all you need to do is clamp in a jigsaw blade, and you can produce them easily and in quantity. If you've run into the same problem, I hope this gives you an idea to try.
How Do You Cut Small Pieces?
Today's video is about safety. I've shared a few tips before on using a miter saw safely, but this time I modified a quick-bar clamp into a jig for holding down small pieces while cutting. By attaching a block of wood to the clamp, I turned it into a dedicated tool that's simple to use without any complicated build. Add a few holes to an MDF sub-base, and you can shift the clamp's position to handle a range of material sizes. In the video, I'm using the miter saw's depth-stop feature so the blade doesn't drop any further than needed. Always wear eye protection when working.
When it comes to safety, I want to be thorough — no shortcuts, no exceptions. Even with small pieces, please don't let your guard down. Check and double-check, and keep your hands, fingers, and eyes protected.
100% Wooden Hinge!
Wooden hinges look tricky, but once you actually build one, the structure is surprisingly simple. Usually you'd cut a dowel to length, but this time I tried a different approach — cutting the parts with a plug cutter. I also tried something a little different: skipping metal pins or nails entirely, and making even the pivot out of wood. The result was a fully wooden hinge that opens and closes smoothly. There's a bit of a creaking sound at first, but I expect that'll fade as the wood surfaces wear in.
The key trick is in how the pivot is cut with the plug cutter — the center hole and the outer shape are cut at the same time, in a single chucking. If you'd like to try a wooden hinge yourself, I hope this gives you a new approach to consider.
Bearing + Dowel = ?
The urethane dual-roller sharpening guide I made before was very stable and I was happy with how it worked. But when you try to use the full width of the stone, one of the rollers can run off the edge. So this time, I designed a new single-roller version that lets you use more of the stone's surface. The roller uses a metal bearing — a lot of common sharpening guides use bearings too, which tells me they're a good match for rigidity and precision. This version also locks with a wing nut, so you can adjust it without a screwdriver.
It's a different structure from before, but I think it makes for a sharpening guide that's easier to use edge-to-edge, and easier to adjust. We also have a more detailed product with a full sharpening walkthrough, if you'd like to check that out too.
A New Way to Make a Solid Wood Box
Making a box like this out of solid wood usually calls for stock around 50mm thick. But boards that thick aren't easy to find, and they're expensive — it felt like a waste to use them on something this small. Gluing up several pieces is one option, but simply joining them tends to leave visible seams and makes the grain look disjointed. So this time, I combined three diamond-shaped pieces into a hexagon, and let the seams themselves become part of a marquetry-style design. Material: Walnut.
I used a single species — walnut — this time, but I think combining a few different woods could make for an even more striking result.
A Better Way to Use Sandpaper
I've made a few sanding blocks before, but wrapping sandpaper around a block and fixing it in place always leaves some parts you can't use. So this time, I tried forming the sandpaper into a loop, so you can shift the worn sections around and use the whole sheet without waste. To form the loop, I use glue to strip off just the abrasive at the ends before joining them, so the seam doesn't end up with extra thickness. There are other ways to tension a loop of sandpaper — springs or cam mechanisms, for example — but I wanted something as simple as possible to build, so I went with a tapered body and a wedge you slide in by hand. No special hardware or tools needed — just push in the wedge to set the tension.
How to Repair an Old Chisel
After years of woodworking, you sometimes end up with old tools passed down from older folks in the craft. Some of them have no handle, or are too worn to use as-is. A chisel handle normally needs a ferrule on the blade side and a hoop on the striking end — this time, instead of those metal fittings, I used hex nuts and shaped the handle to match. It looks a little unusual, but it went together solidly and the chisel is usable again. As for durability, I'll find out as I put it to work. Material: Bubinga.
A Note from Taku
Looking back at this week, I noticed a pattern — a lot of these builds came from repurposing things I already had on hand (hex nuts, a bearing, a quick-bar clamp) instead of buying new parts. Rather than designing a jig from scratch, there's something I want to keep leaning into: solving the problem by tweaking how an everyday item is used.
And quietly, this week, MASA turned a new jig into a plan. If you're curious, take a look.
— Taku and Masa
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