Tips of the Week is our weekly peek at some of the best making tips, tricks, and recommendations we’ve discovered in our travels. Check in every Friday to see what we’ve discovered. And we want to hear from you. Please share your tips, shortcuts, best practices, and tall shop tales in the comments below and we might use your tip in a future column.
Magnetic Glue Caddy
Make:’s Tyler Winegarner shared this with me this week. Still seems like the caddy is pretty tippy, but maybe with stronger magnets, or maybe just having a weighted base on the caddy so that you don’t need to keep it on a metal surface.
Toothing a Surface for Gluing
In this Tested video, where Adam Savage tries his hand at building Jon-a-Tron’s 3DP’d binoculars from Blade Runner 2049, he talks about toothing a surface for gluing. Understanding this concept can be very important in many gluing applications. Toothing refers to scuffing, sanding, or scraping surfaces prior to gluing. What this does is create a whole bunch of micro-surfaces, peaks and valleys, for the glue to adhere to, creating a much stronger bond. The smoother the bonding surface, the more benefit you can usually get from toothing the surface before gluing.
DIY Sponge Brushes
Here’s a decent idea from the endless pool of those “X-Number of Amazing Hacks!” YouTube videos. Screw an office binder clamp onto an old paint brush handle, clip a chunk of foam onto it, and you have a endless foam brush for applying paint, glue, faux finishes, etc.
Improving Jigsaw Cuts with Painter’s Tape
To demonstrate how you can improve your jigsaw cutting using painter’s tape as a guide alone the cut line, Izzy Swan enlists the help of his wife, Danielle (who has very limited woodworking experience). Doing a cut before the tape and then after, you can see the improved accuracy the tape offers.
Going Out of Your Depth
Our last tip this week comes to us from dearly departed David Bowie, whose birthday and deathday were both a few days ago. In this short clip on Facebook, David shares his thoughts on the creative process and creating work that’s fresh and unexpected.
“If you feel safe in the area you are working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel like your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
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