How to use a Shooting Board | Paul Sellers

we're going to talk about shooting boards and this particular one i made to show you is very simple to make very simple to use but what is a shooting board well why is it called a shooting board well it can be because we shoot the edges of pieces of wood and we also shoot the long grain so if we take a plane any kind of plane plane it this way we might call we might have called it shooting the edge and so when we make a miter rough cut off the saw we will shoot the miter we'll shoot the joint line and things like that so that's why it's called a shooting board and i'm going to introduce you to this one this is about the simplest you can get simpler you can simply take a piece of mdf you can take a piece of any kind of wood cut a miter on it you can put two levels of um together like i've just done and you can just nail or screw a piece of wood to another piece of wood and it's very simple way to do that this one i've made a little bit more complicated which is generally my mood and that's why because i've got these pieces of wood that wedge into this so i have this one is reversible so i can do a 45 this way or a 45 that way when i'm shooting this with the plane so and what we want on this is we want exactly 45 on this one and 45 on this one that means that when i put my wedge in here and i offer my piece of wood that's going to be shot at 45 i can take my plane against that and it's going to be dead 45 if i flip it over i've got 45 in this direction why do i need it in both directions well this is square stock and i wouldn't need it because i can shoot it all in one direction but if i take molded stock it's different then i have to put this against here and put the cutting edge going into the mold that's what makes the difference i'm going to show you how those work in a minute but let's go through to what the reasoning behind it is you've just rough cut a piece of wood you've cross cut it with a hand saw you're working somewhere on the site you you don't have one of these uh chop saws which most people do have today and that's what principally made this redundant because almost everybody has a chop saw but if you're an enthusiastic hand tool woodworker like i am and i use these all the time for making sure the end of my wood is is square what i have to do i'm using pine here and pine is probably more ideal than any of the woods because it has compressibility and so i tap this this is slightly oversized for the opening i have about a fraction of an inch down there 30 second or something i tap this until it's perfectly flush and i can move this like this until it's flush with the rebate this part of the carriage that carries the plane now i'm going to take a regular number four smoothing plane do i need a low angle bevel up plane certainly not i've explained that in different places but when you combine the bevel of a number a stanley number four or any of the bench planes the angle is about 44 45 degrees if i took a block plane like this yes it's a low angle plane but the bevel on the top makes it around 42 degrees so there's no difference so i could take a plane like this one with a low angle and it will cut just fine but i can do exactly the same with a number four and i get exactly the same the same cut so that's what we use it for the the main advantage is of course that i get this dead square in both directions i've got it dead square this way and dead square this way that's the most important thing for it so if you need an end grain cut you need to take a thou off it you can do it with that playing with just the plane and this shooting board the recess the sacrificial piece these may be sacrificial pieces but i should tell you i've had this shooting board for about 10 years and this sacrificial piece has never been sacrificed yet i'm still using it i still use it use it easy why because when i tap this out i can always cut an eighth of an inch off here take a shaving off here and slide it back in and this is going to see me out i'm pretty sure so mitres what about miters you've got your mitre cut again it's the same thing tap it until it's flush now many of you have questioned well aren't you using the blade on here is that not cutting away your wood and eroding that well it doesn't because there's no blade at this part of the plane at the bottom side of the plane whichever way i use it the first probably half inch is not cutting i drop this on the side leave it on its side and then i just slide my plane in like this so it's actually sliding without cutting anything it doesn't even cut the sacrificial piece i take my piece of wood slide this butt it right up against the sole of the plane at the front there like that and then i push and i take a cut so that's taken one cut now i'm tweaking this with my finger i'm moving it up a fraction of an inch not very scientific but look what i get i get these beautiful pristine shavings full width shavings once it clears and gets a full width shaving this is going to come out dead on 45 degrees no question about it dead on 45 but the other advantage is it's dead on 90 degrees this way so exactly what i want does this have to be square to this yes does this side have to be square to the plane no it doesn't because you can tweak the angle of the blade presentation with the leverage on the the the lever here so you can micro adjust that and get it dead square dead angled exactly what you want just by tweaking your lever on the plane so it's perfect it's a perfect solution for making uh your miters your square edges and you can actually do any angle you want on this you can make any angle you want using this system it's a perfect solution it gets the job done i love it i can't imagine anything else i would do with it i just want to show you one more thing that i use my shooting board for and that is i take my piece that i want to mitre put my saw right against the mitre stop move it away from the fence and continue through with a through cut once i've done that i can bring my plane in slide it up to the mitre and take that shaving and i've got a perfect miter and the reason it's called a miter of course we all know this the reason it's called a mitre is because when you cut it you always think to yourself um it might have been better what do you think that's great that's all my shooting board it's the simplest form easy to make easy to use and it's a lifetime piece of equipment for you to make these perfect mitres and perfect square ends on your wood

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 59,938

Rating: 4.9902945 out of 5

Keywords: hand tools, paul sellers, woodworking, DIY, workshop, joiner, carpenter, craftsman, crafts, furniture, joinery

Id: KKeGnfHuhvU

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020