Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
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.
There are some great tips in this Tested “This Old F/X Shop” video I posted about this week. One of them is about making sanding sticks using Popsicle sticks. I just bought a set of hobby sanding sticks and I love them. But I love the idea of making your own even more. This way, you have complete control over what grits you want. The commercial sticks have thin foam between the stick and the paper. In some situations, you might want that kind of give, in others, you’d want a harder sanding surface. You could also easily make your own foamy kind by simply adding foam tape between the stick and sandpaper.
In this video, Leah Bolden shows off a feature of a framing square that some newbie framing carpenters may not be aware of. Framing squares have two arms on the blade — the thicker bottom blade, called the body, and a thinner arm (90-degrees from the body), called the tongue. The tongue is designed to be the exact width of a stud. To mark stud placement on a 2 x 4 base plate, you simply measure 16″ along the plate (for standard 16″ on-center stud placement), back off half the width of a 2 x 4 (which is actually a 1-1/2″ by 3-1/2″) ), so 3/4″, line up the tongue of the square as shown in the image, and strike a line on either side. Your stud will now be exactly centered on the 16″ interval.
In the “This Old F/X Shop” video on making…
The post Tips of the Week: Popsicle Sanding Sticks, Swapable Work Surfaces, Wall Framing Trick, Wire Splicing to NASA Standards appeared first on FeedBox.