This is my entry for the garden bench. Not very pretty, but comfortable and durable.

Use a pair of these home-made box framing jigs to make dead-on 90-degree joints. Each jig body is made from two thicknesses of 3/4” MDF sandwiched between two corner mending plates. Use 1/4-inch machine screws or hex bolts, lock washers and hex nuts to hold the sandwiched parts together. The MDF must be trimmed back such that it is recessed about a 1/64-inch from the edges of the corner plates. Make sure the corner plates are squared and trued to each other before tightening the bolts.

Drill a hole through each leg of the fixture to accept the pin of a fence clamp. Make sure the hole is far enough away from the corner to allow easy access for your drill, router or other fastening tool while the jigs are in place.

Here’s an unpainted half-scale mallard drake decoy I carved. It’s the first I’ve attempted since the Parkinson’s set in. Thank goodness for technology. I used a laser beam to keep symmetry on track and a home-made sanding bow to smooth out the rough spots. I confess that back when I taught decoy carving, my most challenged students produced better stuff. Still, I’m proud that I made the attempt.

I use zip ties and short dowel pieces to cinch up veneer glued to curved surfaces, like the violin body form in the photo. Use zip ties in pairs on top and bottom of the form to hold each dowel. Needle-nose pliers are the preferred tool for adjusting the tightness of the zip ties.

If one zip tie is too short, you can always hook two or more in tandem, as shown.

Once the glue dries, just snip off the zip ties and the outer dowels fall off.

These are easy to make. Cut 6-inch lengths of 4-inch-diameter PVC pipe. You’ll need two pieces for each clamp holder. Drill a 1/4-inch hole in the side for lag bolt and drill a 1-1/2-inch hole with a Forstner bit directly across from the bolt hole. The larger hole allows you to get a socket extender in to rachet the lag bolt onto a mounting surface.

You can mount the clamp holders overhead as shown in the photo (I used 2-foot-long pieces of 2×4 nailed to my garage trusses). Or, if you’d rather mount the holders vertically, you could bolt them top and bottom on your clamp cart. Just make sure however you mount them that you have enough clearance to get clamps in and out.

Here is another application for the swimming pool noodle connectors. The versatility of the foam noodles allows you to fit from an ID (vacuum hose) to an OD (bandsaw dust port). I love noodles. They’re great!

I got a bright idea at the neighbor’s swimming pool the other day, watching kids play with those long foam noodles. I bought one for about three bucks, cut it into sections about 8 inches each, and used them to make couplers for my vacuum hoses and power tool dust ports.

The neat thing about the noodles is that they already have a hole in the center and they are flexible. This means you don’t have to spend a bundle at the tool store for specially sized adaptors to fit each tool’s dust port.

I built this for my daughter-in-law to her specifications. She’s a concert violinist who needed a simple shelf to store her sheet music. The limited space in their small apartment made it necessary for me to go vertical rather than horizontal as she had first wanted. I managed to hold to the Fibonacci ratio despite the design constraints.

The Enderle Staple Set (“ESS”) is to staples what a nail set is to nails—the tool drives staples to a perfect set. If you’re using a pneumatic or electric stapler and end up with a staple head protruding from the workpiece, you use the ESS to drive it in straight and flush with the work surface. You can’t do that with a hammer. You’ll wind up with a kinked, bent staple that mars your work surface. But the ESS drives staples in right first time, every time.

I have just received a provisional US Patent on the ESS and am looking for investors. I have a prototype and have tested the tool repeatedly with 100% success.

If you are interested in partnering, please email me at enderle.bob@gmail.com

Regards,