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One thing that we struggle with a lot as wood workers is how to keep the glue off of our clamps. It is inevitable that is going to get there, you could always cover it up with wax paper or newspaper as you are doing your glue up. But I mean really what a pain so you are going to wind up with the little droplets along the edges so I just grab my nice clean putty knife and I rub it along the edge and scrape it off and even try to get into the little grooves here, pop out as much of that glue as possible. Now if you have waxed your clap before, it should be a lot easier to pop that glue off. Once the bar is nice and clean take a little bit off wax, renaissance wax or furniture wax and I wax the bar. Go ahead and wax the inside face of the clamp as well.
Now it is always a good idea to sharpen your plane blades and your chisels as much as possible. The sharper they are the safer they are and the better your work is going to be but realistically how often do we get a chance to do that. There is one thing that you should do that will lengthen the time in between those major re-sharpening weekends and that is basically grab your highest grit stone, whatever you happen to have. I am going to use my 8000 grit Shapton ceramic stone. I will give you some links in the show notes so you could see what these guys look like but they are a little pricey but man are they durable.
Spray with a little bit of water and I take, usually my finest chisels. I have some knock around chisels but my Japanese chisels I usually do this treatment to. All I need to do is just to touch it up basically, is flatten the back again and just polish that up and once I have the back polished then I have to focus on the bevel. I mean it is just like sharpening anything else except that we are doing the very final step just to give us the really nice sharp edge again. So let us do the bevel.
So as you can see, just taking twenty, thirty seconds per chisel, you can get yourself some really nice sharp edges and extend the time in between those really long sharpening weekends.
Now this is just a way for you to touch up the chisels. I will do full show on chisel and plane sharpening in the future but this is not it. But this is a good way to touch up the chisels in between.
Now of course every couple pf weeks we have got to empty out the dust collection bin. The cyclone dumps out into my metal garbage can. You could see down here I just used this bungee strap to hold the lid on nice and tight. Pop the lid off, now fortunately I have emptied this out a number of times in the past month, there is not much in here. Let us dump this in the garbage can and at this point, usually this is full so it is a lot funnier so I do what I call the dump and run. See? Fortunately it is very windy today.
Now for the best part of shop clean-up day. It is the shop dust blow out. What I like to do is open up the backdoor, and I can open up one of the big front doors so that my fan fits under it and I turn on my high velocity fan.
This is my little leaf blower and fortunately we do not have leaves in Arizona but we do have dust, so instead vacuuming up every last speck of dust in here I just fire this guy up, turn the fan on, put on all my protection and blow all the dust out of the shop so it is a lot of fun actually so check it out.
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So that should give you some idea how to keep your shop in tip top shape. I would love to hear some of the things you guys do to keep the shop running smoothly. So feel free to add a comment to the comment section of this post and if you have any questions, you can always email me at mark@thewoodwhisperer.com. Now I still get frequent questions on what you can do to support the show. Fortunately we have a number of ways you can do that. You could shop at the wood whisperer store for equipment and supplies. You can buy wood whisperer gear from the gear store or you could simply send in a donation and do not forget about out festal give away. Get those challenge question and answers to Festool@thewoodwhisperer.com and you could win your very own ETS 125 sander so until next time, remember; a clean shop I a safe shop.
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