Two Priceless Shop Tools That Cost Me Nothing

Whenever a project throws me a problem I haven't solved before, my first instinct is to brace for it to cost me something. I cringe thinking, ‘now I need to go buy a specialty tool’. But two recent jobs reminded me of something I try not to forget: the best problem-solving can be both time-efficient and cost nothing. Sometimes all you need is a screw, some string, a pencil, a sharpie, and a piece of cardboard that was headed for the recycling bin.

The Trammel Method: A Screw, a Pencil, and Some String

I was building a farm table for a client and I was planning to create a pill-shaped top. I needed two perfect arcs closing out a long rectangle. No jig on the market was going to hand me that shape exactly right, and I wasn't about to buy one for a single table.

So I went back to something older than any tool in my shop: the trammel method. You drive a screw into your workpiece at the center point of the arc you want, tie a string to it with a pencil at the other end, and let the string's length be your radius. Pull it taut, swing the pencil through its arc, and you've got a perfect curve. That is it. No math beyond figuring out where that center point needs to sit. Basic math, a steady hand, and the table top came out exactly the way I'd pictured it.

A Sharpie, Painter's Tape, and a Box We'd Just Torn Open

The second job asked for something the trammel method couldn't touch. A client wanted a double bullnose walnut trim wrapped around an arced shower entry, but this arc did not follow a perfect circle. I needed to capture a shape that already existed, exactly as it existed.

The house was in the Hollywood Hills, the clients were movie producers I'd never met, and the interior designer had set aside time for me to come measure. I showed up with a sharpie, a roll of painter's tape, and a piece of cardboard I'd cut from a box that had landed on our doorstep that morning. That's it. I kept thinking about the old saying that first impressions are everything, and here I was walking in to this immaculate home with what looked like nothing. To be even more on the nose, it looked like I had rummaged through their recycling bin before I went into the house. (I promise I did not rummage through their recycling bin).

Simply put, it’s the most honest way I've found to capture a shape like that. I taped the cardboard firmly against the arced entry and did what my four-year-old does so well, I traced it. I was in and out of the house in under fifteen minutes, most of that spent chatting with the designer rather than working hahaha. Back at the shop, I transferred that arc from cardboard to MDF, the one material I keep around strictly for templates, and used it to lay out both the arc and the bullnose profile on a beautiful piece of walnut.

Why Simple Wins

I've bought plenty of tools and templates over the years that were sold to me as huge time-savers. Most got used once and quietly retired to a drawer. A few actually created more work than they solved. The trammel method and the tracing template have never let me down, and I think it's because there's nothing to them that can break, malfunction, or go out of calibration. A string doesn't need batteries. Cardboard doesn't need a firmware update.

There's something else in it too. Both of these jobs asked me to slow down and think before I reached for anything. I had no choose but o understand the actual shape of the problem before deciding how to solve it. That's the same instinct that pulled me out of a television career and into this shop in the first place: less reaching for the fast, easy thing, more sitting with the problem until the honest answer shows itself.

Tell Me What You've Improvised

I'd love to hear what's in your own bag of free tricks, the piece of string, the scrap of cardboard, the household item that saved a project. If you're working on something that has you stuck, reply and tell me about it. Sometimes the answer really is that basic.