How to Prepare Stock for Joinery | Paul Sellers

There are times when you look at your wood it's just arrived on the workbench you think it's been prepared and there's a next level you may want to take it to. Often I take my wood to a new level it's been through a machine it doesn't matter whether I've hand planed it there are things that occur in wood when you take it from a rough tree you dry it out it comes into the workshop it gets slabbed into slabs then it goes into boards then it goes into billets and smaller pieces I've got my small sections here is it ready for actual joinery well I feel like it's not because there are undulations in the surface of the wood there are curves and bends that come after you've cut it after you've passed it through a machine it can create, the machine itself or the hand planing itself can actually change the surface of the board I want my wood dead square dead straight without twists in it so when I get to this stage I've got some boards here I look at the surfaces and I've actually marked these just to show you a little bit of what I mean here if I take a crayon like this this has come from the machine you can see across here there are lines going across the wood that I don't think is acceptable plus when it comes to the joinery if I was fitting a dado into a groove then I would want that to be down to its nearest final size so I might want to take a thousandth of an inch off here let me do that now and show you what I mean I've got my plane I've milled the wood I take a few swipes with the plane and then I wipe this on here and there's no undulation in the surface this is silky smooth I have no undulation and that's really what I'm looking for on this face here there are lines going across here caused by nicks in the blade, those need to come out because they actually will affect the plane or the layout when you offer your square to the edges here to this face they have to be just a little bit more refined so there may even be face mark on here face edge on here from that previous level but still not good enough for my joinery so I've trued this edge up normally I would true the face up so again the same thing happens you take your plane you take off a few thou' off here like this and now this is silky smooth again so I would then put my face mark on here face edge on here and let me show you all those little marks that came from now these are my plane marks but they're thousandth of an inch they're just barely there if I want to take those out again I can go to another level with a scraper and take those out as well this is refining the stock this edge still has the saw marks in it because it was sawn to width then it's fairly accurate but it's still not refined so we take those out so what happens when you come this piece is a little bit too long I want to crosscut this to length, I've got my face mark on here I've got my edge on here can you see here this end is just out of square I may need that to be square because it may affect the jointer that I'm working on if this was going into a housing dado this would have to be square because otherwise my side piece would be out of square so I get the length for the already squared and so my square and here goes here and this is me refining my work but this comes off the saw cut yet again so I'm registering my square against the two prepared edges that I know I've trued up I've made them straight I've made them square this is a refinement for the next level so I crosscut like this, by using the knife wall all the way around I don't get any breakout on here or the underside which I would often get with a machine you can see my knife wall here, there's the knife wall so I cut slightly out of square not wanting to cut into it not wanting to undercut it because I want it dead square if I put this in the vise here on such a short piece when I start to plane and I have nothing here to register against it's quite difficult to do I would usually go to a shooting board and this is just a jig that we have that we often use and this guarantees the squareness of the end in both directions this piece here it's a removable piece here you can take this out slide it in tap it home and it's dead square along this long axis here when I put my plane on here I just simply use that stop like that and I get the dead square end so now that I've rough cut this I put my square on here I've got square this way I'm square this way that's how I prepare my stock and then I have to check for weird things like that but it's all a question of accuracy we're working down to the minutiae now this is what prepares it for the joinery that I want.

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 63,099

Rating: 4.9811025 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, paul sellers

Id: ZKYli4sMGwM

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017