 How to turn those ugly flaws into Enhanced design features. Hola woodworkers, Paul Carlson here a small workshop guide I'm aware that many of you out there never ever make a mistake But for the rest of us mere mortals, we need the ability to fix our woodworking flaws As you can see, I've got some ugly flaws that I just don't want to look at for the life of this workbench So I need to find a fix For a really really small gap sawdust mix with Blue would be the normal plan a In this case, I'm going to go to plan B which is to Even out my flaws and then replace them with little pieces of wood So some creative chisel work to make the large enough cavities for the new wood to fit into and then give it a try In this case, you'll see that it was even much worse than the original problem Take a look This is wrong in oh so many ways. So let's go to plan C Time to bring out the big guns. So I route out a really nice deep and even Slot and then use my chisel to get that as fine tuned as I possibly can Very helpful to use a straight edge to aid your eyes and seeing whether or not you've chiseled some straight lines Well, I still had a problem. So I kept working at it Next cut a slightly oversized replacement piece to go into that slot It's a good idea to taper the edges so that it fits in but then as you pound down it Really becomes a tight fit Probably not a good design to leave that piece sticking out four inches. So let's cut that puppy off Now my other side was Absolutely perfect, but yet I needed to have kind of a matching symmetry So I went ahead and cut out a slot and put in a walnut piece on the other side as well When you've cut your replacement pieces You don't want to try to make them exactly the right height because you might Underdue it better leave them a little bit oversized so that you can trim them down Again taper the edges so that as you pound down it becomes a tighter and tighter fit One of the most used tools in my workshop is my Lee Nielsen low-angle rabbit block plane I'm going to use that to trim down my oversized walnut replacements Do that on the left side here and then sand it with 60 grit and then sand that with 80 grit And then kind of check it with water and raise the grain to see how it looks Highlights the way this looks so the moral of the story is when you make a big flaw Don't hit yourself over the head with a chisel, but just say hey look That's an opportunity to improve my design small workshop guide signing off