How to Square, Flatten, & Dimension Rough Boards by Hand

[Music] thanks for watching wood and Josh Lamarr this is going to be the most important video probably that I've done on traditional woodworking the reason for that is it is on learning how to square up and dimension rough boards like this piece of junk that I got at a from a lumber mill they were throwing it away but it's actually not a piece of junk on the inside and learning how to square it up and make it smooth and dimensional and useful for building furniture out of so that's why it's one of the most important things that we could learn is traditional woodworkers is because that's the most fundamental is taking rough wood and making it usable in furniture and this was something that I really had a hard time learning at first trying to find free resources when I first got started in traditional woodworking so I am going to show you what I've learned over the years try to make it as simple as possible so that you can get all of your sides square and cut to perfect dimensions and get a nice smooth furniture grade board the first step is to cut the board to rough dimensions using panel saws like this crosscut panel saw which has teeth like like a knife which can cut cross the across the grain and a panel saw to cut down the length most of the times I just start off cutting off the the the length because you can see how rough this board is here on both sides so I'm going to cut these this off and tighten it up in my vise you can use a sawhorse if you have one and I first take my tri square and this isn't this doesn't need to be super accurate I'll take the Tri square and lay it about where I want to cut it off and use this soapstone or a pencil or something and run it along there after cutting your board to your rough dimensions with panel saws the next step is to flatten one reference face or the face you're going to measure everything off of some people like to do an edge first I like to do a face first so you can try it out and see what you like first so the first plan that you're going to use is a scrub plane or even even probably more economical is to get a jack plane and camber the edge the edge of the iron or the blade there and open the mouth up so it gives you a nice bite and you're going to be going you're going to be taking it and going across the grain like this you'll notice it gives you some big shavings these could probably a little bit bigger so you just tighten the adjuster there and get some bigger bites you can see I'm just shooting over the board because there's so much in the middle because it's kind of cupping this way the reason its cupping that way is because of the movement like the grain is originally like this the bark is out here so it tends to cut towards the bark side so when you put it in your vise instead of putting it on this and like here where it tips you see how it rocks and you'd have to shim it up too much put it down there and tighten it not too tight but tighten it in between your bench dogs on your bench and because there's too much cupping in the middle I'll take some passes over here to bring this down to make it a little bit easier now this isn't a precision instrument here this is a this is really rough work so you don't need to worry about really tuning this up a whole lot but just take some down in the middle I'd actually first bevel this edge here because when we start going across you don't want to tear it out so let me you don't want the bevel to go down further than if you're if you're worried about not having enough thickness just be careful about that it's nice and so then you can use your plane like this to see how close you are so it looks like I've still got a lot of rocking in here and this is a lot higher so I'll knock it down so then I like to go across the grain first and do a rough pass let me take a little bigger bite you can see these are definitely not fine shavings these are almost like kind of like biscuits or something once I found that this was relatively flat by running this down and siding under it I took a few passes across lengthwise there and now the step is to look and see if there's any wind in your board so in order to do that you will use something called winding sticks you can see these winding sticks one of them has some little darker bars there and I place that one away from me and I place this one on this end parallel to each other and I get here in the center and I go down and I see a side down here and I see which one of those bars is higher than the other one and that tells me that my board is kind of twist sitter in wined so what I'll do is this one actually looks like it looks like that one's a little bit higher so what I'll do is I'll just mark that and it's very likely that this corner over here is also a culprit because boards usually tend to do that when they are winding so now that I've marked these edges that are these corners are a little bit higher I'll place my straightedge on here and I can see that it is a little bit higher so that means in the next step I'm going to focus on these two corners after I determine the high spots and I know that these two corners are a little bit high I will take a different plane which is a jointer plane this is a this is a number 7 jointer plane and I will go across from this high corner to this high corner a few times till I take that pencil down and this really long bed will skip all the little valleys in it will it will make the surface a lot flatter than a smaller plane would do smaller plane would kind of like a like a smoothing plane here we'll just ride the valleys but a jointer plane will skip over those and level everything together you don't want to go too far before you check it with your straightedge okay that's looking a lot better so now what I can do is take some passes diagonally across both ways and continue to use the straightedge and the winding sticks to make sure that the wind stays gone and just to check my my progress with flatness and then after I do some diagonal passes I'll take some passes with the grain so you may notice that I try to always keep the downward pressure right over the iron as much as I can if you shoot out over the edge and you're putting pressure down here and you're going to cup the board so when you enter the board you're pushing down here when you get on the board you're pushing straight down here on you're leaving the board you're removing your hand you could even to practice it just take your hand off or just lighten your pressure now push all the pressure on the back so that it stays flat so now you can go ahead and continue to check it to see if you're creating any any cupping or anything this looks pretty good and then just do some passes across until you're getting full-length shavings all the way across okay check this you can you can twist you're white you're a you're a straight edge back and forth and that looks pretty good it looks pretty flat we'll test test it for wine to just make sure that we haven't reinjure but we haven't reintroduced any and that looks pretty good so we'll go on to the smoothing plane next so you can tell when you're ready to move on to the smoothing plane when you start to see full-length shavings like this from your jointer plane and also when as mentioned your board appears flat in all the different ways and like this too so just set aside your jointer plane when you're at that stage and pull out a smoothing plane got a couple of different types of smoothing planes here like a number four Stanley this is the cheapest and most common a very good plane or a little bit wider which I like is this number four and a half and Stanley smoothing plane and this will get your surface smoother than sandpaper so just take even strokes vertically all the way down and that gives a glassy smooth finish you could take one more pass if you need to and if you see any track little track marks that means that you need to camber the edges of your iron just a little bit give it a little curve like this one to take out those tracks so you can see how I don't have any in here and this face is ready so what I'll do is I'll make a little mark a little squiggly mark on here and then we will work on this edge right here next now that we've got a nice flat reference face I'm going to put the reference face towards me in my vise and grab my jointer plane you can use a jointer plane like this or you can use a nice older jointer plane like this this one that I built most of you will have a number seven jointer plane probably since they're so common and the key here has you change your grip a little bit and you kind of pinch right here and then you use these fingers up against your reference face here to try and give yourself a 90 degree angle as much as possible and if this is really rough some people like to use a jack plane to get it down it's another step for me so I just prefer to get started hoops not like that and the key is to try and make sure that your plane is adjusted so that you're taking the shavings right down the middle now I have a tendency to to go one way or another and when I put my combination square on here to check my progress I'll notice a lot of times that I've got a gap at one spot that it's tilted down like that so this was looking pretty good down here there's no light showing but I start to get a little bit of high spot there and more there so I take my pencil and I mark the areas that I have high spots so it looks like it's kind of a high spot all the way along there so that means I need to concentrate the pressure a little bit more on that side and sometimes if it's really extreme even tilt just a little bit but use your fingers remember over here as a guide and remember what I said about about putting the pressure here when you start together straight down in the middle and then when you come off don't put pressure down here because you're going to create a crown in your board so something you should try to do which isn't possible is to try and scoop it out like scoop of ice cream in the middle and what that will do is it will cause you to have a flat edge there so another thing that you should do as you're working along is to test for just that exact thing to see if your scooping at all and it looks pretty good looks pretty even underneath and then I'll just take this and the key is is to absolutely make sure you're using your straight edge or sorry your combination square or your tri square up against your reference face because we want to create a 90 degree angle along here so it looks like I've solved that problem all along there so now we have a perfect 90 degree angle and so I'll put a different mark on this spot right here and this is a really ancient mark for telling us that we have a reference edge and a reference face so now we can move along and base everything else these other sides off of a perfect 90 degree angle before we can true the other edge up it needs to be paired we need to have a way to make it parallel with this first reference edge that we made and to do that we use a panel gauge so panel gauge is like a marking gauge but a lot longer and it's used for panels not surprisingly like this so what what you first need to do is decide how wide you want your board I'd like to keep mine as long as white as possible on this because this is a nice eight inch board so I I'll I want to make sure that it's trimmed all along the length though so I'll check this and make sure that I'm going to eight inches is not going to be hanging out over the edge here on one of the edges so I'll mark eight inches right here and if you are going to make if you are going to remove a lot more you could mark it in further and describe that and then use a panel ripsaw like this and you'd cut it close to that line and then you'd joint this other edge in but I'm just I'm just going to take off a little bit with hand planes so I will take this gauge and set it about on my line I couldn't even go yeah we'll do that we'll set it right on the line at 8 inches and then tighten this down you can also use this nifty pencil edge but I like to have a nice crisp knife line and then hold it up to this reference edge and just pull it along so now you'll notice that you have a perfectly parallel line here to here so that will give you two perfectly flat glue-up lines once we get this edge down so I'll go ahead and put this flip this around in the vise and like this and remove this with you could you could use a jack plane since there's so much material there to remove and get close to it and then use a tri plane or if you're really close to the edge you could just use I'm sorry your jointer plane there to bring it down to the edge so I'll do that now so I've taken this down almost to that line and while I've been doing I've been checking it with the combination square and with the straight edge to check my progress to make sure that I have another 90 degree angle here and that it's flat and not not cone-shaped there so I am a little bit closer to the line here than here so I'll take a couple passes on this end and then take a couple full-length shavings and just before I hit that line I'm just going to do a final check and that looks really square I've got a little hair here more than there and I'll check this now that I'm down there perfectly ninety degrees and it's perfectly flat there so now you'll notice that we have a reference edge a really nice reference edge a reference face let's flat and another 90-degree edge that's flat to that so now the simple thing to do is to just take a marking gauge like this in order to determine what our other side is going to be like as far as the thickness so you can take your marking gauge along here and find your lowest spot or if you have a predetermined thickness you want to try and match with some other boards you can just take that thickness but I'll just take I won't I'll just keep this as a because I can so I'll get my lowest spot there and go a little bit below it and set that there and I'll check it on the other side as well and that the other side is a little lower so I'll drop this marking gauge down a little bit more I'll use this other edge since it's got the lowest spot and I'll set the gauge a little bit below that because I'm going to do some rough removal and so now this is our new thickness so what I'll do is take this measurement and run it all along there up against our reference face see that and then I'll mark this so I can see it better and then as I go down through and plane I'll do a plane this side this face here just like we did before starting off with a jack plane and then with a jointer plane and then with a smoothing plane and so this will be a uniform thickness all over so I'll go ahead and just do the same thing with a jack plane a jointer plane and the smoothing plane flattening the other side of the board is a lot easier because you have those lines all the way around to tell you when it's parallel and I still check it with the winding sticks and with the straight edge but it's a lot easier to just gauge where you need to give a little more or a little less so now that I've flattened this side and I just verified it with my straightedge it's time to move on to smoothing I'll just take a few passes that overlap each other if you find that this is rough going it's tearing out then flip the board around that means you're going against the grain okay so I have four perfect sides right now I've got two flat and smooth faces and I've got two jointed edges and they're all ninety degrees to each other they are tried and true the only step left now is the ends here so on the ends what you do is you make sure you have a try square that you've tested to be to be actually accurate and you're going to use your reference edge and your reference face to put your square up against and so this then what you want to do is if you have a particularly that you need to cut it to you'd measure down to the other end where wherever it is you need and make sure you put your square on the reference face and reference edge again and make sure you can see this so I will leave to you how I'll leave it up to you how you want to cut this you can do it with a cross cut handsaw like this but I found that the easiest way to do it is to use a miter box saw so that's what I will do and trim these edges so this process can take a little while but that make sure you have your reference edged up against the back there and just cut along your line it's pretty easy now that I'm finished with sawing these edges square square like that one one thing to mention is if you're doing a larger panel that's wider than what your miter saw can handle can simply put your board in the vise like this draw your line and then take a crosscut panel saw and saw clip this close to your line as you can get without hitting it and then come up after that and use your block plane and come from both edges don't hit the don't go over the edge or you'll tear out and come back that way until you get down to your line and then you'll have a perfectly square line as well just make sure you scribe before you do that you that you scribe your straight line across there with a pencil well I've got six perfect sides flat and smooth faces true edges and ends that are square to the edges and it was a good deal of work but it's a lot more satisfying to me than using a you know a power jointer and a planer and a table saw it's something it's a way that it was done hundreds of years ago even a hundred years ago and it just gives you a lot of satisfaction I know there was a lot of details and a lot of tools used in this if you visit the accompanying blog post the link is below this you'll find a more a very detailed blog post with photos and detailed steps along with all the tools that I used in this you don't have to worry about writing it all down so thanks for watching this tutorial on how to square and dimension your boards and if it's been helpful then subscribe up to that blue button up there and visit wood and shop comm and subscribe to receive my other blog posts on how to get started in traditional work thanks so much for watching if you're interested in learning traditional woodworking with hand tools and this is my website at wood and shop comm where you can find free video tutorials buying guides and reviews make sure you subscribe to my regular blog posts and also check out my 10 steps for getting started enjoy you

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 957,397

Rating: 4.8809876 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels, Wood, How-to (Website Category), Hand Tool (Product Category), flatten boards, lumber

Id: Ojeul33vXL4

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 08 2014