Tools (Recommended):
Krylon Easy-Tack Adhesive Spray

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Sean Michael Ragan, and you’re watching Cool Tools.

When I’m making a part, I usually print out a life-size paper template, stick it to the surface of the raw material, and then just drill and cut to the lines. It’s much easier to do all the design and layout work in a computer drawing program than on the physical part, and the 300 dots per inch resolution of your run-of-the-mill desktop printer provides more precision than I usually need.
I used to buy these stick-on mailing labels for that purpose, and for situations where I’m just cutting a new part out of raw stock these work great, because here it doesn’t matter much exactly how the template lines up relative to the existing edges of the material. But for situations where I’m modifying an existing component, like this lathe parting tool holder, the mailing label trick doesn’t work so well because if you don’t get the template lined up exactly right on the first attempt, it’s basically ruined. You have to scrape it off of there, print and cut a whole new template, and try again.

So lately I’ve been experimenting with using this spray-on repositionable adhesive instead. I just print the template onto normal printer paper, give it a few sprays of this stuff on the back and, because it’s repositionable, now I can kind of massage it into place without worrying about having to start all the way over if I make a mistake lining it up. Typically I’ll start in one corner, get it tacked down, then line up another corner along the best edge, tack that down, and then work my way across the piece from there. If you end up with wrinkles, again it’s straightforward to just peel a little bit off, straighten out the wrinkle, and smooth the paper template back down again.

The repositionability of this stuff is also helpful during the cutting process. Instead of having to cut intricate profiles with scissors, I can just spray adhesive onto the back of the template page exactly like it is when it comes off the printer, stick it down on my cutting board, cut it out with a razor or hobby knife, then lift it off and transfer it to my work.

I find I much prefer this method to the old way. So I’ll probably use up my old stock of mailing labels and just not replenish it, which is doubly nice both because that’s one less type of paper I have to keep in stock, and because I no longer have to bother with manually feeding a single sheet of special paper into the printer when I want to make a template.

OK, thank you for watching. As always, you’ll find affiliate links in the description field down below the video. If you’ve seen something here you like, please do check those out, as well as our blog and our podcast over at cool-tools.org. We’ll see you next time.

-- Sean Michael Ragan 03/25/20

(Cool Tools has a YouTube channel with many more tool reviews — editors)