Every few years I run across the same sandpaper cutting jig in woodworking magazines’ Tips and Tricks section. While the design may vary, the concept is always the same; screw a hacksaw blade to a piece of wood and use it to cut sandpaper in half.
I made this jig twenty five years ago and I’m amazed that nearly every time I see it in a woodworking magazine, it wins Best Tip. I originally saw this jig in a book called Making Woodwork Aids & Devices by Robert Wearing published by Sterling Publishing Co. which is a great book on making jigs and fixtures for your shop. It’s so good, the publisher released a third printing of the book a couple of years ago. If you don’t own this book, buy it!
The concept is so simple, you may feel dumb you didn’t think of it yourself. Basically cut a piece of scrap wood that is half the width of your sheets of sandpaper. Then draw a line down the wood that is half the length of your sandpaper.
After cutting the paper in half, stack the sheets on top of each other, turn it 90 degrees and line up the end with the pencil line and rip it again.
Viola, you have four equal sheets of paper, perfect for a 1/4 sheet palm sanders or for hand sanding. Go ahead and send this tip to your favorite woodworking magazine and win a set of Bosch power tools for Best Tip. You can thank me later.
MVFlaim Furnituremaker 
Most of Robert Wearings books are excellent!
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I’ll have to check out his other books.
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I’ve mounted a campaign against Fine Woodworking behaving.in this manner. They have also given the best tip award to one of their contributing editor. The most recent joke that comes to mind is about using one of those flexible saws to level a protruding dowel. In any event, they have never acknowledged my correspondence. It really shouldn’t concern me. Their prizes are not very expensive tools that most every woodworker has. Not so in the past when the winner received an heirloom quality tool.
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I’ve never got the whole submit tips thing. Nearly every magazine does it and most of the tips are decent, but harldy ever do I use one in my shop. I personally would rather have the couple of pages devoted to tips to contain more of the hard content of the magazine instead. However, I’m sure that the economics of having tips helps with retaining subscribers.
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I’ve felt the same way about that particular tip
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I’m glad I’m not the only one.
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