Build A Shooting Board With Hand Tools

[Music] all right i need to knock myself up a new shooting board so i thought it'd be a a good excuse to go through why i like this design um and that's something i get asked quite a lot about it's basically so pretty simple you know why isn't it complicated and the main reason is i like simple this thing doubles up it's a it's a bench hook and a shooting board all in one which means i ain't foraging around for multiple bloody boards and you know i can just pick this up it always sits under the bench you know this i've got me bloody quick grip clamps a couple of twist sticks and that's basically all i keep on a bench and that if it in under there it sat there and that's another reason it's small look how light it is you know that ain't taking up my bench space as you can see these lovely nice shooting boards which are much bigger you know normally made of like sandwiched sheets of ply and uh i just find that i ain't leaving that sat on the bench it's taking up too much room so you're constantly picking the bloody thing up and hanging it up as well as this it's just never in the way now the main difference to most shooting boards is the fact that it doesn't have that shelf that holds the plane that supports the plane you know if i grab a bit of an off cut you know you see a lot of them and it's much more like that see we have that shelf so when you put it down on the bench your plane sits on that it's an all-in-one this design emits that and the reason we got rid of that is so it can be used as a bench hook so instead what you do is you drop it on the bench and the plane then rides against the shooting board and the bench top itself so that's the only negative really you've got to keep your bench top in some sort of order and i'm not known for that you can see once it gets going there is very little difference in the function and of course the reason that you you know you want your bench hook to have the fence you know you don't want that shelf in the ways because you're going to have that on the end of the bench you know you want your saw to be able to run down the side of the bench if you're cutting a through cut or something like that so that's pretty much the reasoning behind its simplicity um another thing i suppose is the construction um i do work with ply sometimes but not often so my off cuts are more likely to be real wood bits like that that make a shooting board i've normally got bits of gash wood kicking about as well as i don't often have a few nice squares of ply so it makes sense to me to build like that and of course if you're working with wood you've got to use methods that suit real wood and of course hand tools more so and that takes us then to the construction and the next big question i get why is that why is the fence and the hook wedged why are there those tapered shapes and they basically they that having it like that serves a couple of purposes and the first one is that it when it goes together it stays together you imagine that was just a straight housed in joint sure that is just re-baited in that was straight as the wood starts to do its moving about thing that it always does that would eventually loosen so what i'm able to do is when we make that joint because it's wedged we stick it in with a bit of glue we give that some welly that really tightens that joint up so it never comes out it'll never loosen up and the second is we want to keep this board flat or flat ish for as long as possible and uh this one despite its age and all the movement it's done it's actually still dead flat there's no cup and that's because we build it out of soft wood so soft elastic it's very bendy that's what i like about it that's why you should always use soft wood for jobs like this and when you wedge this in tight with the glue and the same underneath so you've got two of them just that friction of the tightness keeps that flat just having that joint tight you know you don't want to move on us as much so it gives it some longevity basically now the reason i'm making a new shooting board is because this one's warped and that's something that this design don't take into account it don't really need to because most of the time you don't leave your shooting board on the back of your lorry and what it's done is it's twisted so whilst there's no cup it's done that so when it's on my bench top gives me a bit of stick now the design of these when we come to building this in a minute we kind of can allocate for a little bit of that and a bit of adjustment but that's way too much so for me right now it's easier just to knock a new one up right then so this shouldn't take as long to knock up you know it's about an hour's work really if you get your your finger out your ass now the size of this is for me you know i had a pattern this one off the previous one that was patterned off the previous one that probably just went back to when i was a kid so there's no real science to behind the size of this now i do normally i much prefer to shoot with a bigger plane so i'd normally shoot with this me big number eight but i've broken it i've got to fix it so for now i've been using my little plane and it works well enough so there's no real size change i want to make um the only thing i'm thinking is really i want to get this as knot free as possible that less knots and crap in it they're more stable so i was going to knock it up out of this because that's the same width but i ain't going to get away with these knots and i don't think i've got anything else i really want to cut into and there's that width at the minute so i'm going to actually build it out of this so it's a tad narrower not much i don't think it'll affect out but it's just worth noting but what i'll do is i'll make sure when we've got the drawings done that it's the same size as that and it's up to you and if you want to get wider just laminate a few up maybe maybe rip it down maybe three or four or something and alternate the grain you know that's probably how you'd get a wider job so apart from the width i'm going to build it about the same as that so we'll make a start by finding a bit with no knot in so just throw it on there [Music] so what i'll do is i'll make it a tad longer than it needs to be because i think it's just easy to get them joints in now this is worth noting actually because this board's got a bit of a cup in if you see when i put my square on top it can roll so what i've done is i've tried to average that roll and make sure i draw my line fairly vertical because what you actually can find is when you strike your line you end up actually putting a bit of a curved line in and when you come to cut it you're thinking jesus christ i'm i'm soaring all over here but you're not your line's gone all over the soil's actually going pretty straight so that's just worth noting not that this needs to be accurate but so whip that off [Music] i want a good bit of thickness off this board so i start with a roughing eye and i take a good bit of both sides getting it somewhat flatter than it started [Music] so [Music] so [Music] i then switch over to a finer iron and refine the top surface a target for a slight cup but i want it twist free [Music] wow [Music] wow off that face i square the edges up [Applause] [Applause] and then i gauge the thickness by setting the gauge to the thinnest corner and then plane down and again a slight cup here is good so [Music] there's a few points i think are worth mentioning on the prep of this main board none of them are actually critical but i do think they go a long way to helping now the first is that it's thin you know i'm a good and well under three quarters of an inch there and the reason for that is for that fence and hook to actually act as cult and the thinner this is the more bendy it is so the more kind of chance they've got now the other thing i've done is if you look i'm going to position the the grain on the end now if you're going to make this out of something laminated this is less worth worrying about but i like to have it you see how it's like a u now as as this dries out she always does they're going to straighten out more so the underside is basically as it is going to cook it's going to cook a little bit as it dries so that means it's going to sit on the bench much better so you see now it sits well there's no real rocking on it it might adjust a little bit when i put them calls in but we can make adjustments later to make sure it does sit and by having it so it always cuts to the bench is going to give us far more future possibilities to keep it flat basically so i do think that's quite important the other thing i did is on the top surface i put in and you ain't going to see it but there's an ephesus slide cup in it not much and again that's just going to make sure that when wood goes on it it's registering correctly you don't want to if you've got a curve in this stuff spins and that's irritating so it's basically i've planed a cup in the bottom effects of slight and a cup in the top ever so slight and the way the board's oriented is that when it dries it's going to cook more towards the bench meaning it'll stick to the bench better with time and that slight cup in the top will probably become more flatter as that cupping happens if it does and the other thing i've done on one edge i've planed it square to the top face the other side could stay rough some for all i care it doesn't matter and that's that prepped [Music] right then onto the fence and hook i've rough out a blank that's oversized the plan is to get both out of this one bit i then plane the face flat but this time i want to maximize the thickness so i start with a finer iron [Music] so uh [Music] once i'm happy i square both edges up then thickness for maximum thickness by setting the gauge to the lowest corner [Music] so the planner yet is to try and get both the fence and the hook now the same piece so what i've done i've got a good flat twist free face and this is going to reference in into the shooting board so that's the face i want the flattest and the top again that could stay rough on if you really couldn't be bothered and off that i've squared up both the edges so if i just measure this one i don't think this taper actually matters it's just go off what we've already got is always a good idea so that's a strong inch and an eighth this thin end there's a strong inch and three quarters at the fat end so i'll just replicate that so to do that we will lay the board on and i will let it come through a little bit so that's poking through about half inch and this will become the thin end so if i just put a little line there that represents the width of the board so we'll do a thin end here so inch and an 8 strong an inch and three quarters strong join the dots up square it down the end somewhat like this we can cut well off the line and then we'll plane it too [Music] so [Music] push [Music] [Music] all right so that's them somewhat like um i don't need to be precise because we're going to be tracing each joint off each of these so we'll just basically mark them out pattern them and now what i did is when i thickness these made them a bit fatter or basically i got them as fat as i could out of the rough sawn board and that's um really because we're going to lose some of the thickness when we set it in and you want to keep your fence fairly fat because then at least it's going to offer some support when you shoot in through stop any ragging out or help prevent it anyway so what we're going to do is we're basically going to eyeball it so there's a bit of overhang i can cut it down if i need to later and we'll use the square to set it and then we'll just knife some lines in and i'll be fairly precise so what i'm going to do is i want this overhang here to not be too much let's say about half inch or something like that maybe just a bit under because when we pound on this and we set it in later it'll obviously drag it to us and we can cut any excess off so let's grab my knife we'll get the position for where the square's going about there and i'll actually use my knife against the square for this first edge and this is because this is the reference we want that square as possible so just lightly and bring your fence in press it against the square you can get rid of that then and then we'll come in along the other edge again dead light you can just see our faint lines now this second line may have a little bit of wonder on and that's because you've traced it against wood that's always going to happen because this first one is going to be true because we did that off the square so we'll just deepen those a bit just lightly build pressure set the gauge for the depth go about a quarter inch something like that [Music] all right so there's a few methods of chopping this and the main thing we've got to be concerned about really is getting this line here fairly precise um and that's because the the more accurate we can get this bedded in the less tuning we're gonna have to do at the end so the options really are uh um we can sort the line or we can chop to the line that's really where it comes down to and soaring to the line whilst i think is um it's something that's always favorable in certain circumstances because it's faster basically going to cut to the line jobs are good in a scenario like this no matter if you spend 500 quid on your hand saw it's not going to be as accurate as either a knife or a chisel and the main reason for that is we've got no depth so it's very hard to get a saw to establish it keeps wanting to jump out that line and even if you could i still don't think it is as good as actually something as true as sitting a chisel into that registered knife line and that's locked in so even putting a little saw trough into that is never going to help now if i was going to saw that let's just say this was a shelving unit and we were just doing some housings for that what would favor you is just to clamp a bat into that line clamp down you could even put a little magnet in it and make it a permanent tool um and then you just bring your saw and you've actually got something to run it against so that'll give you some accuracy well like i say for this scenario i want it a bit more precise um and there's only two to do so it won't take as long so that leaves us with two options the first is with a knife and and what that would involve is basically making each of these as deep as we dare go in a pass bringing a chisel in and poking out the waste so you've got a tiny little trough then look like saw trough you bring your knife in again you go a bit deeper and repeat it's quite fast but what i don't like particularly with this knife this is a double bevel blade it's just a like a stanley knife basically it's very hard to keep that depth going vertical so what you tend to find is you go so far then it starts to go on the on the piss a bit you don't know if it's it's not really giving you a true line starts to wonder and again certain scenarios that's not a problem for here i don't think you can beat a chisel and i'll always stand by this that whether it's a tenon or a housing like this that a rusty old answer and a chisel are the most precise things you've got and what we'll basically be doing is sawing off the line well off that line no matter if you're using your teeth you're off the line you're safe and then we can bring the chisel in once this wastes removed once we've got this all knocked out roughly bring a chisel in and we can sit it dead true in that knife line and due to the length of the chisel we can gauge square or in our case here what we'll probably do is put a slight undercutting and you can see a few degrees ever so easily you just whack it and refine that shoulder all the way down and to me that's one of the precisest ways of doing it or the easiest ways to get precise so that's what we'll do so these are adequately deep enough what i'm going to do now is really roughly saw to the waist to that depth so probably come a mill or two off [Music] even though this is just a rough cut you can imagine just how hard it'd be to cut to the line precisely [Music] once it's hacked to depth we can knock that waste out to do this i just whack triangle bites out with a chisel notice though how i don't whack to full depth instead i go a bit and then almost split the waist out this is to prevent me from chiseling too deep as the splitting action won't go past the saw line and then pair the majority of the waste out with a chisel and refine to the depth lines with a router uh then finally we can sort those shoulders out i laid the chisel in the knife line hold it just over vertical so we get a slight undercut then tap it until you hit your depth i the hook is then cut out exactly the same [Music] so [Music] do [Music] once we're happy i give it a quick light swipe over the plane and glue it all together i use plenty of glue and press the fence in then give it a bit of welly locking it into place by having that slight undercut it'll really help it'll bite in and then just use a clamp to make sure that it's all still pressed down tight and once that's at 10 minutes i do the other side yeah so next it's just a case of trimming it all down so on this hook i want to chop that off flush and that sort of nice and clean underneath i'm not snagging on everything and then on the fence i'll just cut the end off the thin end where the plane's gonna go because uh i like the extra length by leaving that on that it just gives more support for a fence um and then i'll probably just trim it to length just basically knock a little bit off probably nothing off the top and and just champ for anything that looks like i'm going to shove my knuckle into it just to make it a little bit more comfy to hold and then it's just a case of truing it up so one early there [Music] [Music] after i've got all those bits cut off i give the reference edge a quick swipe to make sure it's all flush i also make sure the hook is undercut so there's no risk of snagging the plane when it's in use top then it just needs a test and the jobs are good and well we hit that in one and i think that goes to show really the the accuracy of a knife square and a chisel putting it into that that initial line we made for the fence um so what i do basically the way the reason i like these um this designer board is how easy is to adjust you know it's not one of these that you've got to start knocking a fence about or um even those with a second shelf with a fixed fence they can be very hard to adjust as well as what we can do with this is if we you know if we planed this and it was all cac-eyed we can then basically correlate this square edge if you imagine you can adjust it you can move it so that adjustment can come from planing down here so all you've got to do is throw this back in the vice and probably just take a bit more off this end just a light taper or the other way and then check again and just keep doing that until you get it right but if you've done it in this method you should almost get it in one it's very i don't very often have to adjust these and that's basically it now i don't use a shooting board that often and for me it's more of a bench hook but uh they are very handy to have course if you was um want to really set yourself up repeat this process build another one exactly the same except this fence you can use your square the combi square normally does it and you can make it 45 and you've got a 45 degree one or a bloody 90 degree one i very rarely do miters so i tend to just do them freehand if i'm gonna do them now i've got a 45 degree one somewhere it's probably the pile over there with the rest of it but that's it it's a new shooting board so that one can go back under there now if you fancy knocking one of these up and you want a plan then you'll find a link somewhere down there and it should take you to it and if you want to learn a bit more about antoils then there's loads more on our website and in our project builds

Channel: The English Woodworker

Views: 99,296

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, woodworking by hand, Richard Maguire, shooting board, bench hook, quick woodworking projects, woodworking project, how to woodwork

Id: lW8mVIA63Co

Length: 39min 42sec (2382 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022