Cutting small rectangles with a jigsaw
The
couple that works together, stays together...or pitches a huge hissy
fit and gets a divorce. Mark and I don't celebrate Valentine's
Day, but we do spend every day living in each others' pockets, usually
very amicably. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the day is
the time I spend working on a project with Mark.
Even though I grew up
with a handy father, I somehow missed most of the lessons on basic
tool-use. So Mark has taught me how to use a power drill, a miter
saw, and so forth. Monday, I was putting up the last bit of wall
paneling, this time around the newly re-wired electric outlets.
How, I wondered, does one cut a small rectangle out of a piece of
plywood with a jig saw?
I know this is old hat
to those of you who dabble (or work) in construction, but I found this
technique elegant and captivating. First, Mark used a drill to
start a hole in the plywood. Then he cut along the line, curving
around each corner so that he could keep cutting until an oval section
fell out. Third, he went back and cut the corners out --- the
pictures hopefully make this process clearer than my description.
It's always a good day when I learn something new!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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If you have to make lots of identical holes, it's probably easier to make a wooden template that you stick on the plywood and then use a router to make the cuts. A guide bushing or collar on the router protects the template from the bit. With a good outside template you cannot make the holes too big.
This is especially handy if you want to do something fancy with the cut edges like chamfering, rounding or rabbeting. Very handy things, routers.