Joiners Jigs & Rail Squares

They say a good carpenter never blames his tools. That’s because the tools we use for woodworking have advanced so much that all you need to use them are steady hands and good eyes. Woodworking is all about having all the right tools to handle any kind of work. Special jobs require special tools because only those tools have the necessary parts to get the job done.

Specialist Joiners Jigs

You’ll need a special jig that fits the occasion. Different levels of woodworking have different requirements, different needs, and using a big tool for a small job will mess up the measurements. One of the major essential tools is a jig, used for precisely shaping wood at specific angles. Make sure the jig you have is sized up or down for the proper scale you’re working at.

You might also need a jig that can easily work with different angles. Sometimes a hole drilled can’t go straight through, it needs to go at a precise angle to line up with another piece. Corner pieces, ones meeting at an incline or a square hole in an angled surface; a standard flat planer jig can’t do that. Workarounds are sloppy. The more extra steps you add the higher the chances are of screwing up and needing to start from scratch.

Hinge Jigs

One specialty jig is a Hinge Jig. This is used for routing recesses where hinge fittings are inserted. Doors of all sizes and for all uses operate on hinges, from the front door to the bathroom cabinet door. Some hinges may be more exposed than others, but what hinge has fittings that run all the way through a piece of lumber to the other side?

A Hinge Jig gives measurements for exactly where in the door the recess has to be routed to properly fit the hinge so that the corner of the wood is totally flush against the sealing frame or surface that it opens from. No cracks or exposures, the hinge remains totally hidden on the other side. Hinge Jigs take the guesswork out of routing and are more precise than regular measuring tape or rulers can provide. You don’t have to make stencils of the hinge you’re working with either, some Hinge Jigs have pre-installed guides on rails so they can only go straight without turning.

Joiners Jigs

Joinery Jigs can be used to create steep angles into one piece of wood that allows it to screw into another, creating clean right angles in broad cuts of wood without needing to rely on glue or 45-degree angle joining cuts (although they’re good at making those work, too). Assembling a right angle with two pieces of wood is one of those special jobs that requires a professional quality specialty jig.

The jig works by clamping a piece of wood down and has drill guides that go down at a very steep angle. The result is making the wood look like it was scraped out in narrow trails that run all the way down and out the bottom. Screws can then be inserted via a long bit to go through the scraped out broadside and out of the bottom edge of the wood, into a joining piece, forming a right angle joint with minimal effort.

Before using jigs and joineries to assemble your wood it has to get cut. Are you getting straight cuts on your lumber? If you’re using the right tools you will every time. If you want factory cuts without paying for factory-style tools, all you really need is a handsaw and a rail square.

Rail Squares are guides that keep a saw on the right path to cutting at a perfect right angle. They find the flat plane of the edge of a piece of lumber and fasten onto it. The Square part of the tool is used to find the proper path for the Rail, a broad piece of guiding material, to lay on. This gives a surefire guideline that will always create a straight cut from one end of a board to the other. The Rail makes it so the saw will stay in place the whole way. Some handsaws can be equipped with special accessories that attach to the rail itself and glide along the surface, ensuring there are zero mistakes.

Rail Squares

Rail Squares handle the adjustments for the long cuts where the only measurements are one end to the other. For more precise jobs where not everything needs to be cut from the main wood, some rails come with measuring markers to tell you how many inches or centimeters the rail is, and therefore when you’ve reached your destination.

Every project is a puzzle and every tool is a piece that builds a bigger picture. If you have ever worried about getting straight edges, a Rail Square will make those worries disappear. If you’ve wondered how to get precise holes just deep enough into lumber to service-specific functions in a final build? Your answer is a Jig, and there’s a Jig for every kind of hole that can be drilled. A good carpenter doesn’t have to blame his tools if he knows how to use them and has all the right ones at the ready.