Cutlist Cabinet Making

I remember when I was an apprentice using an Electric Plane to plane down the side of a vanity benchtop. As an apprentice I was silly enough to be wearing a long shirt that wasn’t tucked into my pants. While I was planing the side down my shirt came to close to the Electric Plane and got dragged into the blades. Lucky for me, it dragged in enough of the shirt to jam up the blades and stopped them from spinning anymore, otherwise I would’ve had a got chunck of my stomach torn out.
So this is one of the reasons why I thought some safety tips for power tools would be a good thing to write about.
1. Always tuck in loose clothing and preferably don’t wear lose fitting clothing.

2. If you wear rings on your fingers, remove them whilst using power tools.

3. Wear saftey goggles whenever using tools that spray out any flying debri.

4. If you have long hair, tie it up and out of the way.

5. Wear ear plugs or ear muffs when using power tools that are excessively loud.

6. Steel Cap boots should be worn when working with heavy materials and power tools.
They are the general safety tips that should be taken into consideration when you work with power tools.

Please not, I will be talking in metric with these measurements.
When measuring up a room, its always a good idea to have a decent tape measure. There are alot of cheap ones on the market and most of them have bad clips at the front. I personally always buy Stanley Tape Measures.
Start by drawing out the room on a piece of paper, show all walls, windows, doorways and positions of the architraves. If the walls are very long it is best to grab someone else to give you a hand. Start with the walls that are open at one end, place your tape measures clip at the internal wall and measure all the way to the other end. Take note of the wall length on your drawings. Do the same on any other open ended walls. For walls that are between each other eg: a U-shaped room, have someone hold the clip of the tape measure at one end and then at the other end, push the tape measure right into the corner and estimate what the measurement will be.
If you have a good quality tape measure, it should show you how wide the tape actually is, if so then all you need to do is stretch the tape measure out to the other wall and push the back of it against the wall. Look down the front edge of the tape and take note of the measurement it reads as, then add the width of the tape measurement to that first measurement.
When measuring windows and door frames, it is always best to measure to the outer edge of the architrave, not the inside where the door or window actually is. This will make sure that when building anything you wont have to worry about interfering with them. It is also best to measure how high off the floor these architraves are too.
Angle walls, this is a little tip that I use for angle walls. From the internal corner of the wall measure out around 800mm from each corner and place a small mark on the wall. Then measure from mark to mark and take note of the measurement. Make sure you note the measurement you used to mark on the walls. I then use a great little program calledKwikTrig, it is free unless you want the more advanced version. In Kwiktrig, you can input the measurements of the wall, and it will tell you exactly what the angle is.
Ok, that should be all you need to know about measuring up a room.