Home Tips & Hints: June 2004

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Speed Square Saw Guide
For a lot of basic carpentry chores, especially framing with construction lumber, perfectly square cuts aren't crucial. Mark a square line on a board and make the cut with your saw. If you're reasonably careful, you'll get a decent, serviceable cut. But lots of times close isn't good enough. Siding joints and trim joints are just two examples that come to mind. One great way to get square cuts easily is by using a speed square as a saw guide. Just mark the board with a cutline. Place your saw so the blade will cut on the waste side of this line, and slide a speed square against the outboard base of the saw. Hold the square firmly and push the saw against it. (You also can use a framing square or a combination square to get similar results, but both lack the wide face to push against that the speed square has.) This technique takes a couple of tries before it's comfortable, but once it is, a good square cut will always be close at hand.

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Flexible Drywall Knives
Many people who do their own work around the house don't mind hanging a little drywall once in a while. It's heavy work and usually very messy, but it goes up fast--after all, each 4 x 8 sheet covers 32 sq. ft. of wall or ceiling area. But finishing drywall with tape and multiple coats of compound--to say nothing of all the sanding required--is almost universally dreaded. In fact, the process is so annoying that people frequently give up on doing a good job and just hope that a couple of coats of paint will make everything okay. Unfortunately, it won't. One reason that finishing work is so hard is that many people use the wrong tools. They try to spread the compound with the same 4- or 6-in.-wide stiff-blade putty knives they've had around the house for years. A better idea is to buy some flexible knives like the ones that professional finishers use. These tools are commonly available in hardware stores in 6-, 8-, 10- and 12-in. widths that should handle just about any joint you are likely to encounter. (You can tell if they're flexible enough by simply bending the blade as shown here.) The flexibility of these tools allows them to better follow the slight contours of a joint, leaving behind a smoother, more uniform surface that requires far less sanding. And, as we all know, the less sanding the better.

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