sometimes when we start woodworking we
go to the lumberyard to buy our wood and and that's fine and I encourage that, I
go to lumberyard all the time and i buy pre planed stock it's already
squared it's gone through a mass manufacturing process that actually
works ninety percent of the time but there's a
lot of my furniture pieces that I can't rely on that for I want two different
wood, I want some different sizes so I have to prepare the stock and this is a
very rugged piece of wood and I want to get one leg out of this and I can't I'm
going to be cutting this somewhere like this so I'll get rid of most of that way
and it's a table leg it's part of a series of legs or something like that so this will help me to help you to
understand what it takes to square a piece of wood foursquare and that's what we
call it foursquare stock, this particular piece I
need 19 inches for a table leg that's my rough length there and I don't
have to straighten this area all the way through but the first thing I do when I
get a piece of wood is I look down here with my eye and I don't know if you can
see here, there's a curve in this is what we call
a bow so we have to take out the bow it
doesn't look twisted but we've got methods for checking for twist so we'll
show you how to do that the first stage is to get a straight
edge on here and that's what I'm going to do first so firstly this has got
quite a big hump on here but I might go to this point so I eyeball down here I'll have to take about an eighth of an
inch of this hump to get this down let me show you what I do, now even with
this rough sawn stop this is what we this is band saw so these lines going
across here tell me it's band saw it could have been circular saw, band saw
takes a lot less material out but I'm looking at this and I'm looking for the
surface fibers where the bandsaw even when the wood was wet, was ripping in a
different direction and I can tell the orientation of the grain if I do that now, you can also
perhaps see here right down here you can see this is way out of square so I've
got to plane this square but first of all I have to do on
this one face here is plane it as straight as possible and get any twist out, we'll be checking for twist using winding sticks in a minute so first I'm going to put this in the
vise this way make it nice and secure, now this is a
very short sole plane this is the number four, you see me use this all the time not the ideal tool for straightening
stock with but it's working fine so this you can see my high spot here and
here so this plan is taking the high spot when I get to hear because I'm
pressing on the heel of the plane now I've got my gap right at this front edge,
can you see that, so it rocks on there so I want to introduce another plane, now I
could do it with this plane and if it's the only plane you've got go ahead and use it and
periodically what you'll do is you'll take this piece of wood out of the vise
just like this and you eye down the length and already I can see
I've got a nice straight area on this edge even with a number four smoothing
place so I'm going down around to about here I'll mark this just have oversized it a
little bit so I'm going to get a bigger plane out now because I want to show you
what we would typically use and this would be the next plane that you would
buy I've got a number five and a half jack, it's called a jack plane and this is a great plane this is probably the only plane you
would ever really need for truing up your stock so this is a longer plane it's
wider, got more weight to it so when you pull back and throw it forward like this is got enough weight so this is a typical process that you
have to do with every piece of wood you buy when it's rough sawn so as I work
down here I try and work across the whole width, we
have another video on preparing your plane to make sure that it's straight
that the sole is straight the longer the plane the more likely it
is to move in the body of the plane because heat causes the plane sole to
change you don't have to worry about that right
now so I'm going down here eyeball down the length like this, I'm
well within my 20 inches so I have to take this all the way to the end here I'm already nearly there just going to
check myself to see, you see how much this is shifted since I started planing
that's just by eyeballing so we're already pretty close to being squared
but I have to get this face dead flat I'm actually planing against the grain
as well, I can see a little bit of tear out here I just adjusted my plane probably without you noticing just
to take off a little bit more this won't be the final planing
this is just straightening, truing the edge till I get to that end of the billet
like this I eyeball down there and I'm dead
straight that's because the sole of my plane is
dead flat so now I've got to do this adjacent face but one thing I want to do
is make sure I didn't plane in any twists into this so how I do that is with two pieces of
wood we call winding sticks these are beautiful winding sticks you
can see has, they are made out of rosewood, it's got whites in here it's got a dot here it has a dot here and these are
perfectly parallel so when I put the winding stick on this end I put the dot
right in the middle of the piece of wood see if I can position this a little bit
better for you like this this so I make these parralel with one
another I don't flip it this way keep it parallel and then I step back
and I look from one side to the other and I've got some twist in the nice thing about this is this
divides into this stick four or five times so that's exaggerating the twist
so it's actually showing 5 times more twists than it is so I'm slightly higher on this corner
here to here easily corrected by going with the plane again what I do is I go from high point to
high point, here with my plane to make this correction so I go here and across here like this now I believe that's very close to all I
needed to take off so now I go straight across the lentgh like this and then I'm
going to test it with the winding sticks again like this everything out of my line of sight step back over here and I still need
quite a bit more so I'm going to go with a shorter plane this time here what I'm going to do is actually going
to work on this end like that put my winding sticks back in place ok I'm a little bit too far now so I'm
going with my longest sticks till I get rid of that twist and now absolutely no twist in
there now is perfectly out of wind we're out of twist should I say, now look
along it this way and I'm dead straight so now this is my registration face what I do now is I make a mark on here
that we call the face mark somewhere in the middle of my billet I go like this that gives me the cursive letter F it's
actually upside down it would be like this I've taken the bottom part of this F
this is going to point, this is like an arrow that points to this face so now I take the other face and make
that square to this one face this is a perfectly true dead flat face my
square always registers against this face as well my marking gauges and
everything else when I'm laying out so there you can see how far we're still
out of square along this billet, here is less so that means that's telling me
that this is twisted but I've got a slight hollow in here doubt whether you
could see but it's got a hollow in here and so I'm going to have a high spot
here and a high spot here I'm also out of square this is higher
than this so into the vise I'm going to use the
short plane just to get me started see this is taking nothing out here
because this is higher and this is higher so I'm going to focus here this with a few strokes take down some of that high here I've
got more high here but I'm also working out how this grain is working is it good
is it bad as it am I going into the end grain, you
see now I'm getting a stroke all the way through I've got an edge all the way through
here so I'm going to switch planes again go to a longer one little extra weight now I'm being resisted by the grain
because I'm practically planing against the grain here and sometimes this isn't something that's explained
very well especially when people are selling planes the planes always worked
perfectly there is some grain you cannot plane
you will not be able to plane or if it's been finely tuned and sharpened it may
take the first half a dozen strokes off but it won't continue to, here you can
see I think how I've gone down so I'm closer to being square now along here
there I'm very much dead square just a slight around in there but I'm going to turn
around now work from this end because in here this is how I can tell I'm planing
against the grain and sometimes people say it goes against the grain and they
don't understand why this is a bit like stroking the cat backwards so you were stroking the grain backwards
we want to come from the opposite direction, I'll drop this in the vise here this is very obvious here there's lots
of undulating torn grain five this here watch what happens when I come this way hopefully smooth as silk now, much
smoother another thing people often misses this,
this little thing here this is a 4 ounce or whatever, tomato can stuffed
with a rag rolled up and then soaked in oil this makes more difference to the plane
than anything you can do to a plane wonderful now it's moving across this
wood so slick I'm going to just check myself the
square to make sure that I'm not making this more out of square it's almost dead on really, remember I
only have to go down 20 inches down here so gonna back my iron off a little bit,
tweak it, a bit too much a little bit more resistance this is a
hardwood that's a little bit more resistant to
the plane so the square registers against the face edge here, the
face here then I go on here if you can see there, we're now dead square so I eyeball
along the edge is good all the way along there's a little bit of a high spot down
here so I'm going to set my plane quite fine just to take that little bit
off there, I'm going to check myself for square again here that's perfectly square this, there should be
no gaps in here and I'm beyond my 19 inches that I actually want so while I've got this length I'm going
to rip down this piece of wood and I'm going to use a marking gauge to get the
thickness of the piece that I want so only end here this will give me an idea, let me show
you how I want to get rid of this wane here if you go with your square from the
corner into that that corner over there this point here is exactly the same
distance from here as this point is from here so that will tell me where I can
register now this is because I don't have a fixed size for this like if I had
a fixed size it would be inch and a half then I would just mark an inch and a
half I want this as large as I possibly can I actually want two and a quarter and
I've got 2 and 1/8 so I'm actually going to keep this little bit of wane on that
inside edge rather than lose the whole like I need a two and a quarter inch leg
so I set this gauge now to 2 and a quarter like this and I can register the gauge to this face here and also to this face here that gives me
the exact size I want for the billet now I'm going to run this gauge along
this face here using this reference face one thing I didn't do is to mark that
second face I'm going from the where the tail of
this cursive letter F goes I'm going to make a mark like this this is a very
traditional mark, it goes back three four hundred years this marks this face and it shows me all
the time that these two faces are my registration faces for my gauge line to
follow all my square to register again here I'm going to run this gauge along
this edge and this face down there to there then I'm going to turn end for end
and again that the face that I marked originally is going to be
my registration face I run down this edge too, like this so you can
see now that I'm going to be perfectly parallel and I'm going to cut away from
the line one thing else I want to do is make sure I don't cut too much wood I
don't want this piece is not going to be of any value so I'm going to mark this
at 20 inches so that I know where to stop and then after I've done that I can
cross cut here and I can cross cut here and that will ensure I've got two square
ends to my table leg ok we're going to rip down here now with
a fairly big saw we finished with planing for a minute
we're going to rip down here and I've got a saw here that's really good for this this saw has five and a half teeth to
the inch so it's a fairly substantial rip saw so I start away from my line
about maybe a sixteenth of an inch this is going to take me a while to rip
down here so just adjust your body until it's in a good ripping stand, my left leg
is forward my back leg is in a form of a T and I keep ripping and
run down this line till I get to my 20 inch mark so I've gone down to my line what I'm going to do now is I'm going to
cut this to the final length and I'm unhindered by the extra length so I want
to make sure where that, well that was an upper body workout that was, get your heart pumping I'm gonna make a knife wall here and a
knife wall here chisel into it just to get my saw
started now I would use a panel saw for this
probably which is a small hand saw 20, 22 inch that sort of size with
a small tooth the one I'm going to use is 11 points
per inch so I want to put this in the the vise here and I'm angling this up so I
can get a full saw cut across here and I probably will stay away from my line
just a little bit once I started so I can plane this end grain for that we
square I'm through to that two and a quarter depth
this wood here so I got my rough surface here I'm going to plane now
remember this leg is going to be shaped so most of this is going to disappear
this wane on the edge so I'm going to keep this you can see I stayed
away from my line here bit rugged from the hand sawing but I can get this with
the hand plane now so I just plane down to this line like this I'm looking at the grain to see if I'm
planing in the right direction gone for my big plane straight off not
sure if I should let me think about it yeah this is gonna work quite fuzzy down now I'm going to put a
deeper set on my plane you can hear and I'm looking this one edge here for my
reference line another thing too is when you planing
wood that doesn't have this wane on you can set your gauge line to both
sides we can't do that till after you ripped down the length I'm planing against the grain here I'm
going to leave it sometimes that helps you to hug off a
little bit more because it pulls the plane down into the wood I'm going to check myself for square, I'm almost down to my line I'm quite a bit out of square here but I
still have my reference line here you can see that, can you see, I still
have my line I'm right on the line there and up here
I still have my line so I still have I'm down to my line there so I'm going
to plane it square, I'm going to turn it around now 'cause I want to take off this side and I
want to plane with the grain now just to true up that usually means there's a piece of
fiber in their that's dogging you just check yourself for square see if you're
moving towards squareness here still more to come off pretty close
though so I'm not taking anything off this outside edge just yet check myself again see how close, I'm
moving pretty close now close there, little bit more on this side, one more check we are dead square, dead square this end,
still got my registration line there and there eyeball down the length a little bit
hollow this bark can be a little bit rough on
your plane too, perfectly square so on this last face now I already marked this
edge here but I can also mark this corner here even with the bark there, that will
tell me when to stop planing we're pretty close to getting exactly
where we need to be a bit of a high there, that's where I split it
then but now I'm going really into some hard end grain here and I'm reading that
there was a knot here so that you can see this undulating grain here tells me that
there was maybe a small branch something that was coming off there it
could have been a big branch this could be the very tail end of it inside the
wood so I'm turning around and seeing if this will benefit me to turn around and it is definitely making this so much
easier now don't forget you've got this little tool
here just to grease the sole of your plane like this check your depth I'm almost down, more to
come off at this end I'm going to end grain again down here
but generally it's planing up just fine I can see here, is my depth flying is
still on this just almost a thousandth of an inch really not very much so I'm
actually close enough so now I take a shallower setting on my
plane and this is a point where this is
actually straight now so what I might do is switch to a smoothing plane with a
light setting just to smooth up the surface which is what this plane was
really designed for until I get a nice pristine surface and this is now ready
for laying out my joinery because I'm square this way and square this way so I've got my billet done the
only thing I have left to do is to actually cut it to length to the exact
size the finish length to do that I use the knife wall method as I did before, cut
all the way through and I've got my leg ready.
This guy makes great videos. I've seen a few others on youtube and its probably my go to how-to channel.