Hasta La Ideas

As we saw with the Hungarian dude making cutting boards, when you need to crank out the same item thousands of times, you’ll make a jig to speed your work. And if you’ve got a workbench like Ron Paulk’s, you’ll use the dog holes to clamp stop-blocks, straightedges and fixtures. But Woodpeckers Inc., the Ohio-based manufacturer of small-run woodworking tools, is betting that there’s a class of craftspeople who haven’t gotten to bench dogs yet. For them they’ve created the X-Mat Assembly System.

The X-Mat is a simple 12”×12” square made of chemical-resistant resin and gridded up with X-shaped sockets. By interlocking multiple X-mats and dropping in a bunch of Woodpeckers’ accessories—L-Supports, box clamps, anchors and painting fingers—the idea is that you can quickly create temporary jig set-ups for assembly. My first thought was “Who would buy this?” but after watching the video, I must admit there are a lot of times I could’ve used something like this:

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