Stabilise longer boards
Here’s a great way to hold boards for routing and planing with ne’er a worry that they’ll slide around or flop over as you work. Clamp two handscrews to a sawhorse or tabletop so their jaws are lined up. Slide the workpiece into the jaws and tighten the handscrews.
Medium-size handscrews have 15mm of usable jaw surface above the screws, so they grip the board like two long-jawed vices. This tip is especially useful when routing moulding profiles on narrow boards. You can also screw the handscrews to a piece of 20mm plywood on your shop floor and use them to hold doors for edge-planing.
Woodworking bar clamps vice
Slender, curvy workpieces tend to slip and slide in regular woodworking vices, so try Richard Chowin’s great alternative. Clamp a bar or pipe clamp in your bench vice, then tighten the clamp to grip the workpiece at each end. Your future masterpiece won’t move a smidgen while you work, and you’ll have access to all the curves and recesses along its length. This vice also works great for holding more delicate projects for sanding or finishing.
Simple pipe clamps hack
Moaning again that your pipe clamps aren’t long enough to assemble your new “monsterpiece?” Pipe down and quit whining! A few extra 60- and 120-cm pipe segments plus a handful of pipe couplings are all you need for the extra-long or extra-wide job. Screw couplings and extra pipes to those too short pipes to create the needed lengths. If the pipe clamps are under the wood, add spacers slightly higher than the couplings perpendicular to the pipes. When you’re finished, unscrew and store the extra pipes with couplings and you’ll be ready for the next jumbo project that comes down the pipeline.