Two Surprising Jigs
I wanted to call out two jigs I’ve picked up very recently that are surprising me with how well they work.
S&H Drawer Jig
This is a jig for accurately drilling holes for drawer pulls. At $379 it’s not cheap, and very much an indulgence for a hobbyist woodworker like me. But holy cow, this thing is FAST and easy to use!
The method is simple: twist the right side knob until the workpiece is caught snugly in the vertical dimension; then twist the left knob until it’s caught in the horizontal. The holes are now perfectly centered, and all you have to do is drill into the correct ones. (The instructions actually recommend covering the holes you do not want to use with masking tape to discourage errors.) I did all eight drawers for the bathroom vanity in less than 5 minutes.
To do double pulls/knobs, one of the horizontal stops comes off and you do one pull at a time, basically inverting the jig for the left one. Because you are always centered vertically, it comes out perfectly. It can handle drawers as small as about 6 inches and as large as 28 inches, and you can go beyond that if you are doing two pulls (which you probably are for a 30-inch or wider drawer).
To be sure, there are compromises here. For instance, if you do not want your pulls centered vertically — sometimes you want them a little bit above the center — this doesn’t do that without adding a shim, which is a little hackey. And it really doesn’t do door pulls at all, so you still need either another drilling guide or damn good measuring skills for those. True Position Tools sells a jig that can do both doors and drawers for around $200, but you have to do a lot more manual work.
Woodpecker’s StealthStop Miter Gauge
An upgraded miter gauge has been on my “really ought to get one” list for a while. My daily driver has been an Incra with positive stops every 1 degree, but it doesn’t have an extended fence and it doesn’t work well for thin stock. The Wood Whisperer’s review a while back had me interested in either an upgraded Incra or the Jessem, but he didn’t include this Woodpecker’s unit in the testing. Maybe this is new.
The most surprising thing about this, honestly, is the price. For Woodpecker’s stuff you just assume it will be hideously expensive and ask whether your need justifies the premium. But this thing is a surprisingly modest $99 — half the price of the Incra, depending on what model Incra you get, and less than half the Jessem. I bought two optional add-ons, a few wooden ends and a ball-end Allen driver, to bring the total up to $110.
I put it together in about 5 minutes, and other than the squareness of the fence to the table — which the instructions say is deliberately off, and was easily adjusted — it was perfect. There aren’t nearly as many fixed angles as my old Incra, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed angles beyond the common miters — 45, 30, 15, 22.5, etc — in 20-plus years of woodworking. So I’ll just keep the Incra for those occasional needs.
The “StealthStop” is a pretty clever device. It sits in a T-slot on the fence, folded down, so it doesn’t stop anything when you don’t want it to. When you need it, you move it to the right place, tighten the Allen screw (hence the optional screwdriver — which is kind of a pain, really, but I get how something finger-friendly wouldn’t sit flush), and flip out the stop. There’s even a micro adjust (tool-free), which Jessem doesn’t offer. Overall it’s reasonably convenient and there’s no need to remove the stop and store it somewhere when you’re not using it.
The extension on this is not very long; it would have been the shortest in the Wood Whisperer’s review by a substantial amount, as it only extends to 29 inches and the original fence is 20. If you want more you can add a sacrificial fence — there’s a slot in the fence that takes a standard 1/4×20 nut — and lose the StealthStop, I guess. It’s also very easy to slide the fence off entirely and put something like the Woodhaven box joint jig on instead, because this miter gauge has a lot of room at the back.
A lot of miter gauges are usable from either side of the blade, depending on how you assemble them. I like mine on the right, but I seem to be in the minority on that. The Woodpecker jig can be assembled this way, as I did, but the particleboard add-ons to make a zero clearance fence have to be modified. They come with a long back side and two sets of hardware to connect to the fence, but if you don’t attach it to the left side there isn’t enough room — your blade will run into the aluminum fence. I altered mine by cutting off about half the length and drilling a new hole for the mounting hardware (1 set, not 2). It works fine this way.
Is this a perfect substitute for the Jessem or high-end Incra miter gauges? No, of course not. It is, however, every bit as accurate as they are (unless you need tenths of a degree), but costs $100 instead of $279. Who’d have expected that from Woodpeckers?
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