I like to drink iced tea. I make it in a half-gallon pitcher in my refrigerator. I don’t like running out of iced tea, so I keep a spare half-gallon in a repurposed orange juice bottle. Actually, that’s the bottle I pour my tea from; when it’s empty, I refill it from the pitcher and make another half-gallon.
When I first began doing this, I found that refilling the juice bottle was a bit of a tedious exercise. I’d place a funnel in the mouth of the bottle and begin pouring, but the side of the funnel created a close-enough-to-perfect seal with the mouth of the bottle, so when the funnel became full enough, drainage into the bottle would slow to a trickle. The incoming tea needs to displace the air in the bottle, y’see, and the “seal” left nowhere for that air to go.
Yesterday, I was going through this process when I noticed a five-inch strip of cardboard left on the counter from when I had opened a package from the freezer. I folded the strip in half and placed it over the lip of the juice bottle’s mouth, then I placed the funnel. This gave me a sufficient air gap that the funnel never got a chance to fill up, let alone get full enough to make me stop pouring.
I was so proud of my solution that I simply had to come here and boast about it.
All are welcome to use this thread to toot their own horns!
I used to need to refill a pepper grinder often. The problem was the grinder’s fill port was too small to aim a typical spice jar of peppercorns at neatly; they’d spill around the sides while pouring. But if you used a standard cheapo plastic kitchen funnel the spout became too narrow and two or 3 peppercorns would jam at the narrow point of the funnel, blocking further pourage.
So I took one of those too-small plastic funnels & cut off almost all of the narrow part. Leaving just enough so the funnel sat neatly on the grinder, but the funnel opening was now large enough the peppercorns didn’t jam on the way through.
I just make a thumb-and-finger circle at the opening of the pepper grinder fill port. This is just wide enough to act as enough of a funnel for the peppercorns to be poured in without spillage.
Once when I was replacing locks on a door I realized that for the new doorknob I had to drill a larger circular hole. But hole saw bits require a drill bit in the center to bite into wood to keep the saw part where it needs to be, and I had an open hole. My solution-- I got an old wooden broomstick, which fit perfectly in the bolt opening and worked like a charm to keep the bit centered.
In these situations, just clamp/nail/screw a piece of wood to the door (or whatever you’re drilling though), that’ll give the drill something to get started with and stay lined up
I don’t get what the point is of the scrap wood piece in front. The scrap wood piece clamped in back would work, but would require an extra long drill bit. I think my solution was superior, IMHO
Perhaps the scrap in front is at least partly to protect the door from the C-clamp foot.
As well, IMO you answered your own question. The pilot bit on a standard hole saw is not long enough to engage scrap clamped to the back of the door. But is of course long enough for the scrap on the front. The next question is whether the hole saw itself gets enough bite on the door proper to maintain concentricity before the pilot bit gets into the back scrap.
IMO it really takes both to ensure a quality job.
As to your solution, I’m unsure how you clamp what’s effectively a round dowel into the bolt hole to ensure it doesn’t wobble while the pilot bit is getting started.
Sure, but in the illustration in Joey_P’s post the scrap in front is also covering the part of the door to be drilled. That makes no sense to me.
The wooden broomstick I used was, luckily, just the right diameter to fit snugly in the bolthole and not wobble around. In any case, my solution isn’t theoretical-- it empirically worked, very well. You guys can try to convince me I’m not a lateral thinking genius all you want, but it ain’t working
Joey_P’s methid would work if you used a thin bit of wood (eg plywood) and drilled the smaller
pilot hole in that first, then centered that pilot hole over the existing hole (by looking through
from the other side).
It’s what lines up the hole saw since, as you noted, the drill bit isn’t likely to make it to the far end. Also, and probably more importantly, it gets the hole saw started and keeps it centered, at least until the saw is through it, which, if you’re lucky, is all the way though the wood you’re actually trying to enlarge the hole in.
Another option, if you have nesting hole saws, is to use the one sized for the original hole AS the pilot.
OK, well, I’m sure that method works, but again I must advocate for my solution as the superior one because it requires no clamping and no drilling into extra wood.
In the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson:
“I am so smart. S-M-R-T…I mean, S-M-A-R-T”
(ETA: I posted before I saw that you posted that video-- my solution, of course, only works in the doorknob hole enlarging scenario where you have a bolt hole to put the broomstick or wooden dowel into)
My closet was too shallow for my standard-sized shirts and their hangers. So I took down the rail, cut it into thirds, got some hardware, and re-mounted it perpendicularly to form three parallel rows. It uses the space just as efficiently and now I can see the full shirt (and whether it’s ironed) while it’s still hanging. Plus I can close the closet door.
Why it was built that way is a separate question losts in the mists of time.
