Tongue sander

In my various DIYings around the house, it often happens that I need to make two pieces of wood meet. Quite often, they are not entirely straightforward: for example, a mitred skirting board that's in a skewey corner, or a mantlepiece that needs to fit snugly against a non-flat wall.

In some cases, there are easy solutions (eg, butt the two pieces as close as possible; scribe a line on one piece a fixed distance from the other, then cut away the excess). Often, though, it's a case of offering the wood up, seeing where it needs to be shaved by a fraction, shaving it down, repeating, repeating... A good carpenter can do it faster, but most of us aren't great carpenters.

The Tongue Sander is designed to address this problem. Imagine a handheld power tool rather like an electric chisel/scraper, with a blade that oscillates in and out at high speed and with small travel. Fine.

Now the blade. The blade (which is disposable) is basically a stiff but flexible strip of double-sided abrasive. It could be a flexible metal strip with abrasive coating on each side, or something more like two sheets of sandpaper back-to-back, but stiffened with plastic strips between the abrasive layers. Other options are possible. The point is that it's a thin flexible tongue of double-sided abrasive.

To use, just offer up the two pieces of wood, with the tongue between them. Switch on, and use the tongue to abrade away the points that are "pinching". After a few moments, the two pieces will be perfectly contoured to one another, separated only by the thickness of the tongue. Withdraw the tongue (please do not pun at this point), and move the pieces together to create a near-perfect joint.

In some cases, you might only want to sand one side of the joint: fine, there are "single sided tongues" available. There are even some existing tools that might be able to use a special blade like this.