 The secrets to eliminating gaps in your final workpiece Well, I would work here's Paul Carson here small workshop guy Doing my samurai carpenter workbench. This is the top to the workbench The base is already finishing down below and I want to talk about When you do your final drive fit before you start gluing up making sure you've gotten rid of any gaps that you don't want the first secret to eliminating these gaps that you don't want is To real be very very precise when you're dimensioning your lumber Yeah, if you have it if you can afford it to have a good jointer and to have a good thickness planer and Have your table saw tuned up so you're getting very precise cuts And so obviously take a lot of effort to measure precisely probably using very thin Pins or pencils So and knowing whether you're taking the line or leaving the line when you do your cut Just leaving or taking a line can make a little bit of a difference if two pieces are done differently So learn to do that and be very precise now let's suppose you're like a ninety nine point nine percent of the rest of us and No matter how you try you don't really cut that precisely You could do a nice drive fit you pull it all together with the clamps like I did here Although I've taken the clamps off now And so some of this might have relaxed a little bit But you find a gap that you don't want in your final piece Well, then I would recommend you get some feeler gauges If you don't have these they're pretty inexpensive. I use them all the time for all sorts of things So get your feeler gauges have one of your blades out Go along the gap and see if you can figure out where it's hitting Because the reason you have a gap if you pulled it together with a clamp is that something is hitting before this is hitting So you need to find out where that is. That's why these are so Phenomenal for that purpose. So I go in here and say, all right. Is this all hitting? No, you know that one's all right. That one's okay This was a little bit of hitting Well, no, it's hitting on inside here So I might want to shave the inside edge of this a little bit and then oh look at that one That's really not able to go in there. So I'm hitting when I pull the end piece I'm hitting right down here first. That's stopping the pole and that's leaving the gap So then I use painter's tape and I make notes to myself I don't want to be doing Trimming away stuff that doesn't need to be trimmed away. So in this case I've made a note to myself to do this bottom gap only. I also tell myself Don't worry about a big opening there because I'm going to cover it. It's going to be hidden anyway So it's internal and so I don't have to worry about it too much This is not internal. This is so I want this closed up even if I have a large hole there That's my recommendation. I also recommend you consider a really good flashlight. I like to have a rechargeable one This is a DeWalt 12 volt. I always have another battery on the charger and So I use this numerous times throughout my day in the workshop Probably because I'm older and my eyes aren't very good anymore Blue tape, flashlight, feeler gauges Find out where it's restricting, take it apart, fix that piece, put it back together again And then before you do your final glue up and you've got all these gaps closed Get your clamps laid out and get them to the right size. What you want to do is Do all the time consuming stuff before you get glue on anything If you found any of this helpful do me a favor give me a thumbs up or a like Leave a comment. You can even leave a bad comment. I don't care. I'll I'll just eliminate it and share and Subscribe if you haven't already subscribed to my channel. Thanks small workshop guy signing off