Woodworking & DIY Blog

Milwaukee's self-feedling wood bit

By Cathy Dalrymple

Last week, I paid a visit to the Milwaukee Tool Company’s headquarters. The folks in Wisconsin had an impressive batch of new tools. Aside from all the drills, reciprocating saws and nailers, I was especially excited about their new speed-feed self-feeding wood bits, which make boring through lumber like cutting butter with a hot knife. Each bit has a feed screw that anchors it to a workpiece as the cutting spurs begin to score the wood, allowing for a clean hole with little tearout. Unlike traditional drill bits, Milwaukee’s new bit takes purchase immediately, which prevents any skipping across the wood. This feature is particularly apparent when drilling at an angle. I used the 5/8″ bit and drilled a hole at approximately 45° into an SPF 2×4 with ease. If I were to make the same hole with a straight shank bit, it would likely slip across the wood a little before boring, and if I were to use a standard spade bit, I would likely encounter some grabbing and wrist wrenching before the hole started. These features all lead to safer, quicker and more accurate drilling with less strain on the tool, which, in turn, should conserve batteries and prevent. Wow, all that from a drill bit!

The Lane's winning plans for the 2010 Deck Contest

Congratulations to Mia and Robert Lane of Demorestville, Ont.; they are our 2010 Deck Contest winners. They impressed the judges with their elegant plan to create a space in their backyard for dining, gardening and even bird watching. Their prize package includes Kayu Batu hardwood from Liv Outdoor, a hot tub from Softub, a Broil King barbecue and tools from DeWalt and Echo. They are going to be putting those tools to good use as they need to complete the deck by September 7. We look forward to seeing the results.

Kerdi board comes in the following thicknesses: 3/16", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1-1/8", 1-1/2" and 2".

When preparing your bathroom walls for tiles, you can often be confronted with more layers than a wedding cake. There’s the mould-resistant drywall, concrete board, a waterproof membrane and thinset. Whew. Then the tiles go up.

The folks at Schluter have come up with a product that cuts down on the stuff that has to go up on your bathroom walls. It seems they’ve taken their Kerdi membrane (Layer 3, above) and turned it into a board. The Kerdi board can be attached to existing walls, or can be used to build new walls. The boards, which have an extruded polystyrene foam core with reinforced layers and fleece webbing, can be fastened to wood or metal studs with screws and washers. You can even construct partition walls themselves with this board. All it takes is a utility knife and the right bonding agent. Then you can put the tiles up on the board.

Here’s a Kerdi board video for more information.

Have you worked with Kerdi board? Even if you haven’t, what are your thoughts on this new product?

Ripping out nails.

In typical, Victoria Day fashion, I had a conversation about decks this weekend. A friend and I bashed out a few ideas for the space around his cottage. He has two entrances to his building, one with a small deck platform and the other with stairs that simply come down from a set of french doors. The grand plan is to join the entrances with a low deck that runs beside the cottage.

Popping deck boards

Since my friend isn’t working with a blank slate, he’ll have to do some tearing up, which made me think of two elegant wrecking, nay, dismantling tools. I saw both the Duckbill deck wrecker and its sibling, the nail puller, at our show, in March of this year. They both make the chores of popping boards and removing nails easier. So, when my friend starts working on his new deck, I know what jobs I’ll volunteer for.

For more information, visit Deck Masters of Canada.

For advice on how to build a deck, try this article, “Build a top notch deck.”

Trevor traces the figure of a hockey player onto the Team Canada clock he's made.

Just like the popular rides at an amusement park, you have to be yay high in order to build your own clock at the Kids’ Corner. But, if mom and dad are around, sometimes the height requirement isn’t an issue. With his dad on hand, 11-year-old Trevor is ready to transform a piece of 1×8 pine into a Team Canada clock. This design is the most popular pattern out of the eight designed by Melissa Alexander, a volunteer at the Canadian Home Workshop Show.

Standing on top of a big, blue storage bin to reach the marking table, Trevor carefully traces the maple-leaf pattern onto his workpiece. Larry, another CHW Show volunteer, helps Trevor drill the necessary holes and cut out the pattern with a scroll saw. “It vibrates a bit,” Trevor said of the loud stationary tool. Under the workstation’s light, Trevor doesn’t seem to mind all the sawdust he’s making, or that of so many kids building their projects. More than 350 kids would come by the Kids Corner during the three-day show.

Almost done! Next, Larry leads Trevor to the sanding station. Like many others, Trevor is silent in concentration as he works with a spindle sander and then a palm sander. Last but not least, Trevor traces the hockey player in action onto the front of his clock, and marks the quarter-hand segments for painting and finishing at home.

Trevor  holds the new clock proudly in both his freckled hands, and after snapping a photo with his dad, says, “I’m going to hang it up in my room.”

—Words and photo by Valerie Lam

I take a turn at the lathe with guidance from Derek Dix.

It’s late on Sunday night, the sawdust seems to have settled and the tools are all packed up. The Canadian Home Workshop Show is over. In the Woodworking 101 interactive area, showgoers built 285 wine racks designed by Jennifer Hart. Tim Alexander, the designer of clocks built in the Kids’ Corner, and his team lead young woodworkers through more than 300 projects. All weekend long, I saw happy people leaving the International Centre with new tools and machines that they had picked up at the show. And I, like many others, had a chance to learn new tips and techniques and to catch up with friends and contributors to our magazine. Man, it was a great show. See you at the next one in November.

My new pen.

Check these snaps from Friday and today. There’s more of this tomorrow. Come down.

Kids between the ages of seven and 17 can build these funky clocks.

Novice woodworkers discover just how fun it is to build a project in the Woodworking 101 feature area.

The action around the CHW Booth.

Magazines!

The Woodworking 101 project: a wine rack.

Building a wine rack.

Woodworker Ryan Shervill gives tips on how to build a stunning butcher-block table.

Ryan Shervill's butcher-block table.

I’m trying to get a shop-appropriate playlist together and I’m hoping you can help me fill it out. Here’s what I have so far:

• “If I Were a Carpenter,” Tim Hardin
• “Norwegian Wood,” The Beatles
• “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” Pete Seeger and Lee Hays
• “U Can’t Touch This,” M.C. Hammer (Because of the lyrics “Stop. Hammer time.”)
• “Screwdriver,” The White Stripes
• “Mr. Fix It,” UB40
• “Build It Up, Tear It Down,” Fatboy Slim
• “Let’s Build A Home,” The White Stripes
• “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” Pink Floyd
• “Build Ya Skills,” KRS-One

And here’s what I have for songs that use tools as musical instruments:

• “The Lumberjack,” Jackyl (It has a chainsaw solo!)
• “RDA (Rock Death America),” The Rheostatics (Circ saw and/or drill starts at the beginning of the song)
• The Weakerthans (I know they use a saw in a few of their songs. What’s their best use of a saw as a instrument?)

All right folks. What am I missing?

The Winter 2010 issue of CHW should be in your hands soon (sooner for subscribers). And when do you get the issue, you will see this map of Canada with some of the handiest places in the country. Biscuit Point, Drill Lake, Hammer Cove—the names just ooze DIY.

Out of this map, I would like to propose a contest: tell me, in the comments section of this post, what the No. 1 handiest place is Canada is. (Don’t say Drill Lake just because it’s No. 1 on the map. That doesn’t count.) In 50 words or less, make the argument for one of the places above or one that is not included here. Be honest or be witty or both. I’ll chose the winner, who will get a Milwaukee M12 copper tubing cutter worth $225.

So, what’s the handiest spot in Canada?

[Disclaimer: Contest only open to folks with a Canadian mailing address. Apologies international readers.]

Credit: Flickr/cesarastudillo

We all like a good deal, but lately, there’s been a greater examination of the true price we pay for inexpensive items. On a global scale, you have works like Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. In a review over at Boing Boing describes Shell’s analysis:

[The cost of discount culture is] a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centres, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.

Of course that last word caught my attention. Craftsmanship—it’s something we all value when building our woodworking projects or renovating our houses. But even people like us are not immune to “cheap creep.”

It creeps up on you when you are in the home-improvement store and you see a huge set of screwdrivers for cheap. Our columnist, Paul Rush, explores this phenomenon in his upcoming column in the Winter 2010 issue of Canadian Home Workshop. (Look for it in early December.) With his trademark dry wit, Paul tells how he pays the price for his love of bargans:

Stout screws laugh at cheap screwdrivers. When you are out on the deck with the biggest drivers from your 20-for-$2.99 package, bad things can happen: you stick your slotted screwdriver into a screw you want to remove and you twist to the left. And there is movement, except it is the metal shaft of the screwdriver turning in the plastic handle. The screw just sits there.

Recently, over at Professional Power Tool Guide, they ask “Are Cheap Power Tool Accessories Worth Buying?” I bet you can guess the answer:

If you have an inferior accessory, it can cause a lot of problems. First, the job might take longer because you are replacing blades or other accessories more often and in the long run this actually cost more. Another problem is putting more wear and tear on your power tools. Because the accessory is not working to its maximum capacity, the way a professional accessory should, the tool has to do more work, which means more heat, which means a shorter life of the tool.

So, that’s a lot of evidence against the cheap. Now here comes CHW’s Steve Maxwell with his own counter-intuitive observation. In an article appearing in our Winter 2010 issue, Steve dismantles a Milwaukee 18-volt drill ($300) and an 18-volt TMT drill ($90). Here’ s what he finds:

Cheap tools are getting better at a rate faster than the high-end ones, and you have to wonder where it’ll all stop. Sure, top-end tools are still clearly built better, but even the cheap ones are surprisingly good these days.

I guess the jury is still out. Where do you stand on cheap tools? I’d love to read your comments below.