I decided it would be worth spending some more time meddling with spare pieces of wood before getting stuck in with the project itself, where my cuts would matter. Here are the simple lessons I’ve gleaned, even if they are obvious:
Jigsaws can’t be used on miniscule pieces
You can’t make cuts on a small piece of wood with a jigsaw as the jigsaw safety bracket/guide will get in the way and bump into whatever is holding down the wood.
The only way around this is to move the clamps further away from the jigsaw, such as securely fastening a large piece of wood, drill holes into it so your jigsaw has a location to start from, then cut the shape out starting from those holes
Ideally you would make all the cuts you intend to with the jigsaw before cutting so much that the target piece is flimsy or detatched from the main piece.
Use the right damn blades
Common sense I guess, but there’s a huge difference between a Clean Cut jigsaw blade designed for 2-10mm soft wood and a Quick Cut blade designed to cut through 30mm of hard woods.
Its more than worth the £10 to buy a set of blades allows you to pick between fast cuts and clean cuts.
Always cut outside the lines
I’m always really tempted to try and speed things up by cutting with the jigsaw along the lines I’ve marked for the final width of the wood I’m cutting. This usually ends up with me overshooting the target and cutting inside the lines, which ruins the piece I’m working on.
Its far better to cut outside the lines and file/sand/cut further portions out, than it is to risk cutting too much from your target.
Drill soft wood between hard woods
When my drill bits penetrated the back of any hardwood piece, it would usually push out the fibers and cause a real mess. Even the side being drilled into would rise up slightly due to the pulling motion of the drill bits grooves.
The solution to stop this rising up issue is to sandwich your hardwood/fiberboard between two much more dense woods such as MDF. You can then drill through the MDF into the hardwood and then back into the MDF. Obviously as you drill through the hardboard theres nowhere for frayed wood fibers to go, so there is no visible fraying.
Don’t try to drill blindly through one piece of wood into another lying underneath though, with this technique its best to drill a hole into the piece of MDF which will go on top, then align the hole with markings on your hardwood of there you want to drill. Secure the woods, drill down into the premade hole, into the hardwood and back into MDF.
Wear gloves
A good set of gloves, especially when filing, will save your fingers.
I used mine today to balance a file as I ran it across the flat of some cut wood – this stopped me accidentally curving the motion of the file.
Try everything out
Do a test of your crazy methods before diving into the project. And on that note, I’m now going to go buy myself some more dolls house wiring items from cir-kit concepts. I still have a number of wall-related items to test, such as implementing sockets and wall plugs.
