How To Use A Shooting Board - Like a Pro!

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop if you have watched any of my videos you've seen me use a shooting board most important shopmate implement you can get if you haven't figured out how to use it i'm going to show you how to use a shooting board stay tuned i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new and you haven't subscribed please do so hit the notification bell so you'll receive alerts when we release a new video and anytime we use a special tool we always leave a description down below alright let's get to work his primary function is to square board both in this direction and in this direction now in order to do that there's certain things about your shooting board that have to be in check well let's start with them first you need a surface that is nice and flat to hold your work piece you don't want your board rocking then you need an area sitting lower that is also flat that holds your plane and as it too must be parallel to this surface you wouldn't want that tip one way or the other your fence needs to be securely held and it also needs to be perfectly square so how do you check it well the easiest way is to put your plane in place tight against the rail put your steel square in there and check it now if you want to get really accurate get yourself a feeler gauge this is a thou and a half put that in and it's snug there and it's snug there so i know that's within a thou and a half might even be better than that you have a cleat in the front and the cleat is just there to secure the bore the shooting board against the front of your bench so it doesn't move when you're using it i often like to put a clamp back here to hold that securely so as i'm using the shooting board it doesn't move at all and of course your fence needs to be made out of a really strong material because it takes a fair bit of abuse so as long as you have that you should be able to get that shooting board to work perfectly so that your work will be that much better if you're going to use a shooting board you have to have a good plane it has to be sharp and it has to have square sides now i prefer to use my five and a half and the reason is because it's long enough and heavy enough to be really good on the shooting board yet it's not so big and cumbersome as to be a great plane for general purpose on the bench if i can get one plane to do both functions that's a little less clutter on my bench they do make specialty planes just for shooting boards i think your money's better spent elsewhere five and a half works fantastic and has never left me wanting for anything different when i use a shooting board and i use it a lot one feature about your plane you must have is the sides must be square to the sole so in position take your square and move that into place and that shouldn't show any light and if you want to be even more specific you can again use your your feeler gauge to go in there and check it now if it's out a slight amount you can compensate for that by simply using your lateral adjustment lever if i pull this up then the blade is going to pivot like that and take a heavier cut on the bottom than it is in the top if i push it down it does the opposite it'll take a heavier cut on the top than it does on the bottom so you can tweak it to get it just perfect as long as you're close on the sides to the sole okay let's square the edge of a board the end of a board with a shooting board this is the primary function of this tool in order to do that we have to have a straight edge up against that fence if it isn't it's going to rock like this and it's very irritating before we do anything we have to know how to hold the plane and make sure it's set up properly and i will say this i get asked to troubleshoot with shooting board problems for folks all the time and i would guess and say nine times out of ten it's a result of a blade that is not properly sharpened if you consider there's three surfaces on this board that are three types of surfaces there's the face grain there's the edge and there's the end of those three this is the toughest one the blade needs to be the sharpest to tackle this so make sure your blade is sharp if not check that video again and try it a second time all right how do we hold the plane well it really wasn't well thought out when it came to using planes on their side there isn't a great spot to hold your hand so what i do is number one i keep the i grab hold of it at the narrowest the pardon me the widest spot which is right here i use this triangular area to take this part of my palm and kind of stick it in there and it gives me something to push against my fingers wrap around the underside here my thumb's on the back side and you have to keep that from tipping so you want to concentrate and keep the force right down through the middle of the plane you never want to tip out or to tip forward you also have to keep it tight to this rail if you allow it to drift away you're going to lose your square setup so what you're doing keeping it standing plum you're keeping it tight to the fence you're moving it forward you're pulling it back it is nice to be able to have a run at the board meaning get the plane moving before the blade gets bogged down in the wood you can't start back here you'd most likely end up hitting the edge of the board and leaving a big dent in it so you have to be engaged with the sole of course the farther away you get the more of a run you get now i'll get that i'll hit that and i want to carry that blade all the way through by the way when we designed this shooting board we pulled the fence which typically was back here forward a few inches what i found when students were first learning if the fence was back here in the process of pushing the plane this way they'd be spinning around at the end this way with the fence pulled forward you still have some track keeping that moving in a nice straight line okay so we've got that covered now we need to get a nice straight edge to go up against the fence so i can use my shooting board to do that however all it's really doing is acting as a stop to keep the board from sliding forward but it is keeping the board and the plane square this way however because of the amount of surface area we have here compared to here that's not very effective in squaring so all i'm going to do is push with my opposite hand directly against the board right across from the blade and i'll actually use the sole of the plane to straighten this edge so like so watching to make sure that the board is fully engaged with the plane over its entire length do it a couple of times so i know i'm getting a full length pass now i can take that and set it against the fence and it'll be nice and secure now before we start we've got to remember we have to keep the plane tight to the rail or to the edge of the board we have to keep the board fed into the plane or else it'll stop cutting however if you push harder this way then you're pushing the plane that way you're going to lose your square setup so this one has to trump this one not as much force if i were to plane just like this watch what happens i need a little more blade out here in the end you start to get these fibers breaking off like that well on a finished piece of wood that's terrible so what we'll do this is the side that we're going to put against the fence i've flipped it over and the first thing i'm going to do is pull it away from the fence back here about an eighth of an inch and i'm going to come in and i'm going to cut a little chamfer right here that's going to make that just a little bit deeper flip it over now that produces a little gap right here and that's going to allow me to plane that end now if i stop short i've got a still got a chamfer on there if i go too far i blow past the chamfer and i go back to having tear out what i need to do is stop just before the chamfer ends and you can usually see it as a little spot where one one plane meets the second plane i can go one more time actually i went a little bit too far you see those fibers breaking off now the only way to get rid of that is either make your board narrower by going in and cleaning that up or taking more off this way and the lat the first one is probably the easier one to do so remember plane must stand plumb keep it tight to the side of the shooting board keep this board fed into the plane but not pushing harder than you're pushing your plane this way you also want to keep it flat on your shooting board you don't want it sitting up like that in order to get a square set up this way this must remain tight against the shooting board the plane action will keep it tight to the fence so you don't have to worry too much about that okay time to troubleshoot let's check this now this is the face that was against the shooting board so this is the one we wanted to check the end if i were to see that that's out of square at all this is what we would do if if it was high here meaning the board was looking like this then what i need to do is take more off the bottom than the top so i would come in here like this and i would grab hold of my lateral adjustment lever i actually push down on the blade while pulling up on the lateral adjustment lever and what that will do is that will ever sew slightly tilt the blade so that more is kicking out the bottom are showing the bottom and the top go back in cut my little chamfer a little too much blade there and then playing that again go in and check and if it's good we're done if it's not further correction if i was showing that it was more at the top other words it was in the opposite direction it was sticking out more here than down the bottom then i would simply go in and i would pull up on my blade push down on my lateral adjustment lever pivoting the blade like this again don't forget to cut that little chamfer a little more blade flip it over come in watch the little gap right here it'll eventually disappear and just before it disappears where you want to stop go in and check with your plane or your square and if it's good we're done now if it was out of square in this direction and this is the edge that we put against the fence so this is the one we're going to check against if that isn't perfectly square then i would suggest either our technique was wrong or our fence was not square to our plane first thing i would do is go in and check that and if that checks out well then we had a problem with our technique maybe we had some debris in there maybe we weren't holding it securely in place do it again and check if sometimes you actually purposely have to have this slightly out of square in order to fit what you can do is take this this is a great handy little tool you can take a shim and you can set it in here which would purposely hold that out and allow you to do whatever you need to in terms of a slight angle on the end of the board or you can turn it this way to do it in the opposite direction okay when you're building something particularly drawers and you have to have that board a precise length always best to use a knife and you're going to go in there and you're going to score a line across the board now what i would do come in and cut my little chamfer check and make sure that this blade is parallel to the sole make sure you don't have any debris every once in a while you've got to come in and just clean that stuff out of there you don't want anything preventing that plane from sitting in there perfectly flush up against that track come in here and make my little chamfer and i'm going to chamfer right to that line if you want to what you can do is take that and roll it over onto the this edge so that i can see that from here now flip it over and as i start the plane this is where i like to have some magnifier so i can see it even better but as i get closer and closer to that line what you're going to see happen is these little short fibers are going to start breaking away and this allows you to get extremely precise you just keep planing until they they'll disappear first and that'll leave you with a little gap and then you just keep going until eventually that gap will close and the end of the board will sit tight to the plane now i'm going to retract the blade pull it in a little bit so i can sneak up on this [Music] a little more yet i can still see a little bit of a gap now that looks good and you can always turn it over and check and if you can't see any remnant of the line then you pretty much guaranteed that's where you want to be sometimes the question is asked how much of a cut do i want well you may notice that when you're planing the long grain blade exposure that works really well on the long grain or the edge often isn't enough to get much of a shaving on the end that seems to be hardly cutting so i'm going to come in here and take a little more add expose the blade a little more now you can feel it cut and you want something that is comfortable easy enough to push through so you have lots of control i'll give you an example of something that's too much exposure too much blade now that's really hard to push and i don't have a lot of control i'd much rather back that off to about a quarter of that amount and i can go in as long as the blade is nice and sharp i can go in and be as precise as i need to be it's like that here's a way of telling whether or not your blade is parallel to your sole if your the end of your board is pretty close to being square and you're about to plane the end of it but you're going to flip it over pull it away from the fence to cut your little chamfer if you look at that line left between the two surfaces other words at the end of your chamfer if it's not perpendicular to the end of the board chances are your blade is a little out of square or not parallel to the sole so the way i would read this is it's cutting on a bit of a slope now i just made that cut like that that means i need a little more exposure on the top so what i would do is push the lateral adjustment lever down go in and do that again and now that's closer to being square across the end something else that i find helps when using a shooting board is to take a clamp and just clamp that to the front of your bench make sure the clamps not stick in in your way but now when you go in and you're working with this it's far less likely to move around and i find it just a lot easier to go in there and do what i got to do without having this shifting on me now the final tip is a little bit of a double-edged sword because it tends to uh attract dust every once in a while i've got to go in and clean that track but just like plane wax working well when planing a board if you go in and just put a little bit of wax on that side then when you rest it on there you'll find that that moves so much easier now the only downside is it has a tendency to build up on you and sawdust gets in there as well but just a quick clean up and it's good to go hi if you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and i've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your woodwork

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 32,099

Rating: 4.9777226 out of 5

Keywords: how to use a shooting board, how use a shooting board like a pro, proper use of a shooting board, using a shooting board, what is a shooting board, shooting board, shooting board jig, shooting board miter, shooting board techniques, easy shooting board, shooting boards, rob cosman, woodworking

Id: ft_MSz-6guA

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021