Jigs – making the most of the tools we have

jig jiɡ/

noun: jig; plural noun: jigs

a lively dance with leaping movements.
a device that holds a piece of work and guides the tools operating on it.

For this project we’ve used the following power-tools:
Laguna 14/12 bandsaw,
Ridgid 13″ thickness planer
DeWalt circular saw
Two routers – Bosch Colt palm router and my good ol’ Porter-Cable mounted in a home-made router table)
Two hand-held drills.

My shop space is very limited (garage…driveway…backyard), so there are tools I’ll never own, like a decent sized table saw. I managed to get away with adding the band-saw because while it’s a big tool, it has a small footprint. So what do you do when you can’t own what many consider to be one of the most essential shop tools? For me the answer has been jigs.

Without them I doubt I’d be able to take on a project like this and have it be successful. This trailer is more like a rolling piece of cabinetry than it is a building/framing project, and what that means is a lot of precise cuts and measurements. Maybe that’s because I’m more of a furniture maker at heart than I am a builder.

Making a good jig may very well leave you feeling like dancing one. A well thought out, and precisely set up jig can help get the most out of an ordinary circular saw or router – two of my most frequently used hand-held tools.

Here are a few of the jigs I’ve used in this project so far, some I’ve thought out myself, others I’ve found on the internet, you-tube especially.

Rip cut guide:
I have not got a single decent picture of this one even though I use it a lot. I have an 8 foot long one, and a shorter 4 foot long. They look pretty much the same as these:

You screw a straight edge to a thin board and then cut off the excess by running the circular saw’s foot plate along the straight edge. The benefit to this is the thin board is cut off exactly the distance the blade is from the straight edge. When you need to cut something, you line up the cut off edge with the line you want to cut. As long as you take care in setting up the line and clamping the jig on, you can make very precise cuts.

Cross cut guide:
Same goes for this quickie cross-cut jig I used to cut all of the trailer’s beams. A scrap of 3/4″ plywood screwed to two 2×4’s and fastened down to the table. Notice that the work is supported by the table and the blade cuts into the table top. It may not be pretty, but both it and the saw blade were set up exactly square.

The result is very precise square cuts, and you can even shave off very thin slices.

Router jigs:
I think of these as #hashtag jigs because of the way I make them. They are set up to guide the router in cutting a precise slot of a certain width. They work particularly well with my smaller palm router because it has a square base plate. I like to make them out of MDF window casing which doesn’t hold up well over time, but is inexpensive and pretty straight so it’s great for jigs I need just for one job.

For this project # jigs have been used for a number of things: cutting the slots in the beams to fit the flexible curved ribs, cutting mortises in the bent-laminated center-ribs for the beam-ends, and for door hinge-mortises.

Here is a slot in progress.

I clamped the same one to my door frame to cut hinge-mortises. I’d set it up to cut a 2″ slot, narrower than my hinge, but I was too lazy to make another, so I just cut one slot, moved it over and cut the second side. They’re easy to line up because you can clearly see where the router is going to cut.

The one below is probably not quite a complicated as it looks. I needed to cut rib-slots in all the trailer’s beams and they needed to be spaced exactly. So I invented this jig which is my usual # jig, fastened down to the table, and with a thin piece of wood acting as a springy stop block. After cutting a slot, the beam could be slid along until the “flapper” fit into it, spacing it for the next cut.

The result, perfectly lined up slots in all the beams:

Another trick I like is using a template and a flush-cut bit. For the curved end walls, and arched doors/openings I first made a couple of templates out of 1/2″ MDF and then used the router to trim everything to match: