Master the Shooting Board

as a teacher furniture making i've had a lot of exposure to different types of shooting boards over the years whether it's through literature or people that i've taught with from around the world all of them have their pluses and minuses what i've done is gone through each of these and found out what's valuable to me and try to consolidate it into one board that i keep under my bench and i use it all the time and this is what i've come up with it doesn't look like much but it's what you can do with it that counts the construction is pretty simple it is a piece of plywood or well-behaved wood quarter-sawn that is attached to a beam and that beam gets pinched in the shoulder vise on top i've dadoed through that allows me to have a low stick set into it and then while the dado set up i've gone ahead and i've put a dado in a block that i can use for a planing end grain which locks into the stick the truth is shooting boards come out of square from time to time they need to be freshened up and it's really nice to be able to detach the components shoot them back to where they need to be and away you go if this is glued to this i can't do that and it becomes useless when i first start out i need to make this square to the piece that i'm riding against and let me show you how i do that i've done the best i can to ensure that this is let in square to the base of the the board but if it isn't i'll do this i'll check it for square and i'll note which way it's off a little in the back a little in the front and i'll take the beam off and i will plane it true this one's true so i'm not going to do that so a little bit high here few step shavings and then i recheck until i get it square it's also good practice if you're going to be shooting with a shooting board you've got to get good at using your hand tools in conjunction with it once that's square i'm ready to go let me show you the first way that i use this planing against a single dog can be twisty and so i find sliding it down to the end of the shoulder vise makes a great simple planing stop it also ensures the work is flat on the bench it is not spanning the gap in the tail vise which tends to flex and not give you a flat board the second mode of operation is using it to shoot thin stock so not easy to plane stuff under an eighth of an inch the thin little strip i let in at the top of the shooting board allows me to butt the stock to it in plane the aspect of it just as a regular shooting board is pretty obvious where you can just take two panels that you're hoping to glue together put them on your side not running against the shooting board at all but just shooting these two surfaces until they're true and if your plane is ground square will give you a nice square result here the the planing stop that we fit earlier is fitted each time and it is flushed each time so i know i've got a zero tolerance throat so i've got this set in place it's just fractionally proud of the surface and now i come along with my plane and i'll shoot that until i know i've got an exact one-to-one relationship and now i can plane off the end grain of stock without breakout the fifth way that i use it is for shooting miters and so i've had a ver variety of different shooting boards as time has gone on for shooting miters and this just gets right to the point what i like to do is take the block flip it over and with a combination square set this block up for a 45. you know some people will say well you know it'd be better just to have a board set up for when you're shooting but what i find is that i can micro adjust the miter if i want the tips a little bit tighter or not the key to this method is to put a little bit of water under this block so it doesn't slide around and then to clamp it down and with that planed off now i can shoot a miter with no tear out and i've got the ability to get it exactly how i want it so five methods one shooting board i think you'll find it a great way to work

Channel: FineWoodworking

Views: 405,573

Keywords: brightcove, free, tiv600, free content, youtube, Rousseau, joinery, Fine Woodworking, Master the Shooting Board, Shooting Board

Id: pwYJhfChDdM

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2013