Workshop Woodworking Jigs

Split a hair and make it square with our wide-body table saw accessory.

Do you have a favorite ceramic tile or item you would like to place as an inlay in a project. Today is tip shows you how to take this item and make a perfect inlay template.

Alignment and spacing of the holes is fairly critical since you don not want shelves that sit crooked or wobble. To achieve uniform spacing for the holes, nothing works better than a layout jig.

Crosscuts and miters are easy to cut on a table saw with the help of a miter gauge. But cutting a compound miter is a little more of a challenge. That is because you have to tilt the saw blade and then adjust the miter gauge to make this cut. Instead, I like to use a slightly easier method for cutting accurate compound miters.

Here are two photos of a jig I built for my router in less than half an hour. The two 1/4 inches threaded rods screw into the router base (they come from another off-the-shelf jig.) The wooden block is just some random piece of hardwood scrap.

Here are free downloadable woodworking plans for a shop-made jig to use on a band saw.

Follow along at the link and you will be able to sharpen wood chisels, plane blades, turning gouges, and more using your drill press.

Here is how to make a jig that keeps shelf pegs neatly in a row.

Ease your turning-between-centers woes by first knocking-off square corners with this bandsaw jig.

This is a link to a Google 3D SketchUp drawing for an adjustable router mortising jig. You will need the SketchUp software to download this drawing and its freely available online. We do not provide support for this software. Not all drawings have the measurements displayed but you can use the measurement tool in SketchUp to easily and accurately determine the dimensions of each lumber part. Most drawings do not have instructions, its assumed you can build it based on the completed drawing provided.

I have always been frustrated with the difficulty in gluing, and especially clamping 45 degree miter joints. On this page, I describe the best method of gluing such joints I have found yet. I do not consider this method to be very good, just the best that I have figured out so far.

Here is a way to quickly trim the solid-wood edge banding on plywood shelves yet still give good support for your router.

Build a finger joint jig using the free step-by-step tutorial at the link. There is also a video you can watch if you need extra help.

Box joints add a professional touch to your projects, they can be cut on a table saw with a dado blade or with a router in a table with a straight bit.

Instead of making three separate jigs for common woodworking joinery, Doug Blacke found a way to combine all three into one super jig.

We built our own Frid jig a dozen years ago and have used it steadily since; you will find it lying about the store somewhere near the routers, looking a little rough around the edges but still willing. The design is so simple and effective that it deserves to be a standard accessory in every shop equipped with a plunge router.

By Mike Schwing - While working with thick expensive hardwoods, sometimes the workpieces get too thin for me to comfortably move them with my hands. There are all sorts of devices on the market to help with this. I have most of them! None really worked for me well enough for this specific task, but the simple thing described here does.

Many projects require cutting a perfect circle or an oval, and you can accomplish the task with a router and a special jig to guide it. The two jigs described at this link can be used with a router when you want to cut circles or angles.

Recently I had to cut a series of evenly spaced dadoes across the sides of some small display shelves I was making. I wanted to make the dadoes on my router table, and I needed a way to space them evenly. That is when I came up with the idea for an auxiliary table fitted with an index pin.

You can make mortises with a fixed-base router mounted in a router table. To make a mortise this way, you have to lower a workpiece onto a spinning bit. It takes a little bit of setup to do this safely and correctly.

At the link you can download the free plans and watch the video to build your own single blade box joint jig.

If you are building something that requires a lot of dowels the same size, you should build this dowel cutting jig first. It also helps prevent tearout.

Here is a simple jig for your table saw that can do a great deal of the work of a jointer. In this set of free woodworking plans, learn how to build a simple table saw jointer jig that will give you clean, straight edges from which to do glue-ups, make other joints or just ensure a clean edge for that piece of stock.

You can trim a miter quickly and accurately with nothing more than a sharp hand plane and a simple jig, like the one shown here.

I own a fixed-base router, so I figured I had have to invest in a more expensive plunge router if I ever wanted to make plunge cuts. But then I figured out a way to make safe, accurate plunge cuts with my fixed-base router.

In issue 165 of Woodsmith magazine, you will find these intriguing L-shaped shelves. Each of the corners is mitered and is reinforced with a biscuit. If you have a biscuit joiner, great. But if you do not, you can use this jig to cut slots on the router table and then use hardboard splines instead of biscuits.

Here are free step-by-step instructions to build your own box joint jig.

I designed a jig, ... that lets me rip short strips (less than 2 ft long), without having to readjust the fence between cuts or get my hands close to the blade.

Follow along with the step-by-step instructions, pictures and video to make your own star knob jig.