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Found 111 results for the keyword ‘Tip’

  • TIP - A third hand in carpentry.

    Need a third hand to hold the other end of something up in the air, or level with a beam, while you are struggling to get the opposite end hammered in at the correct position.You could just drop a couple of nails into the top of the floating piece and bend them over so that they hang from the oth...
  • Running wires over and inside walls

    When you want to put a lighting sconce on a wall, there is always the question of how to get the electrical wires to that location. Often it is possible to carry wires up from an electrical outlet, or down from the attic -- now how to hide them.If you are working on the surface, as you are oblig...
  • Dividing an angle in half -- the quick trick

    There are times, especially when working with moulding, that you need to divide an angle in half. I learned how to do this with a compass in high school and since then I have fallen in love with the Angle Finder, an impressive little device that uses more geometry than my compass to measure exac...
  • How to drive screws without splitting the wood.

    Driving a screw directly into wood forces the grain of the wood apart. Soft wood will crush a lot and allow the screw to force its way through. Hard wood is much more likely to simply split when the screw forces its way between the wood fibres. Either hard or soft wood will split when you scre...
  • Is a Wobbly dado blade accurate?

    We got this question from a store customer who was trying to decide which blade to buy?Wobble Washer Dado BladeThe first photo shows what we call a "wobble washer" blade. Actually the blade itself isn't wobbly, but the washers on both sides are bevelled. You can rotate them to skew the blade in...
  • A cold weather caulking gun -- Tip

    One of our viewers sent in this tip.Although you can supposedly caulk outdoors even when the temperature is down to almost -10 degrees Celsius, if your caulking material itself is that cold, you won't be able to get it to flow out of the gun, let alone stick to anything.First, keep the caulking a...
  • Another magnet for metal drilling.

    Dan from Mount Pearl, Newfoundland has seen us place magnets around the hole where we were drilling to trap the metal shavings. He suggests using speaker magnets because they are round doughnut shaped.Great idea Dan, except that all the new speakers we had didn't have those magnets any more, and...
  • A repair for chipped ceramic tiles.

    When you have a chip in a ceramic tile you can get a fairly strong repair by using fingernail polish. It comes in a wide variety of colours these days, including both white and black and since you can mix polishes, you should be able to get close to the colour of just about any tile.For the best ...
  • TIP -- Using left over concrete.

    Pouring concrete and have a bit left over? Or do you have half a sack of concrete mix leftover that will probably go hard through humidity before you get around to using it?Getting rid of this stuff can be a problem, so turn it into part of your landscaping.Judy suggests simply taking a large bu...
  • Tip -- Making a custom sanding block.

    We received the tip that when you want to sand molding, you can make a custom sanding block by wrapping thin plastic wrap over the molding and then forming a block into the wood molding with epoxy auto body repair putty. When it hardens, remove the block, pull off the plastic and you have a pret...