Mastering the Art of Lumber Milling Without a Jointer - A NO BS Guide

I'm Jonathan Kats Moses welcome back to the best nobs woodworking instruction where we give you content that is no fluff no sponsors and utilitarian information you can take into the shop and use today now we're going to talk about how to Joint a board how to get it flat square and parallel without a jointer professionals would typically do this with a jointer and a planner but for most beginner Woodworkers you have a small space they're expensive clunky and take up a lot of room luckily there's a lot of ways to do this with tools you already have around the shop like this router table which I'm going to show you a way that I've never shown in a video before on how to Joint an edge let's start by talking about what is flat square and parallel and then we'll start talking about how to get it so what is flat square and parallel well it sounds pretty self-explanatory but it's all sides are flat the faces are parallel to each other the edges are parallel to each other and then everything is square all the way around the board what is the easiest way to get this it is to buy S4s Lumber which stands for surfaced on four sides you can buy lumber as rough lumber S2s S3 s pretty self-explanatory but the cost difference between S4s and Ru Lumber or S2s is so significant that it's probably cheaper for you to buy a planer which is the easiest tool in getting Lumber flat so let's head over to the jointer and let's talk about the goal and then I'm going to show you the tools we're going to use to solve this before we talk about alternates to the jointer Let's Talk About Faces versus edges and the Order of Operations now this is a face the wide side and an edge is the narrow side pretty self-explanatory the way a jointer works is you would run a board over the cutter head to the outfeed side place a flat face against your 90° fence and then you would joint an edge that's going to make it flat and square to that face so our face is our reference and so that's what we need to flatten first because it may flatten in a different plane depending on how you start or what tool you use and then your Edge is going to be thrown off if you did it first so we do face and then Edge we're going to do that by heading over to the planer which is a great technique anyways if you already own a joiner that is not wide enough for the board you are trying to flatten this is a good good technique to use all right to give you an idea of how to do this I got the crappiest piece of Lumber in my shop and we're going to get this flat square and parallel now to know how to do this you got to understand how a planer works it references off the bed the bed is flat it has two pressure rollers that press down very hard and then a cutter head in between them and so anything that is referencing off the bed is going to be cut at the exact same height of the cutter head so if your board looks like this on the bottom that's how the Top's going to look so to get this cued and twisted board flat we need to immobile ize it on something flat and that is where this sled comes in which looks like this it has a stop on it that is glued down or screwed down if it is lower than your board you got to be careful you got to make sure this is lower than you're going to plane and we're going to take this board some shims and some hot glue and we're going to immobilize it all right so we have our shims in place the way you put them in is you just want to go until they snug up you don't want to do it so that they shove your board way up unless your board has a huge tilt to it but typically you would just stick them in the high spots until they SN snug up and then throw hot glue on them then we're going to take marker and this is going to help us decide when it is flat so when all this marker is gone you'll know your board is flat and then we're going to just run it through the planer as normal and then when all this marker is gone we know we have one flat side and we're going to flip it over take it off the sled get rid of the hot glue and run it through with this face down now one thing you want to be really careful of is you don't know this is not flat at all so you don't know where the high and low spots are so you want to run it through your planer just kind of find the high spot before you turn your planer on so that way you don't have like one side that takes a little bit and then you get to the end of your board and it's trying to take a half inch pass you pop a breaker you know nobody likes that so let's run this through and get one flat [Music] [Music] [Applause] face [Music] so now we have two faces that are flat and parallel to each other our next step would be to do the edges now there's a couple other ways to do this one if it is bigger than your planer like a slab you need to create a sled and that is essentially a handheld CNC and the way it works is you create something with two equal sides something where you can immobilize your board same way we did on the ler sled with little hot glue and shims and you want to just kind of split the difference try and get everything sort of the same height and then a sled for your router and your router will be able to pass back and forth in fact I did it here in this slab flattening video I'm not going to do this in my shop because if you do this try and do it outside if you can it creates more mess than you could possibly imagine you do something like this slab flattening bit that we carry here in our store they come in a variety of shapes and sizes this one's a great value but they have tons of them out there and you're going to pass your router at a set depth you're going to set the depth of your router and not change it you're going to you go back and forth across your whole thing until you have made it same thing as the planner you put marker until you've taken all that marker and you simply flip it over and do it again the other way is with hand planes and that obviously is the way they've been doing it for thousands of years but man is it a lot of effort and is definitely the slowest all right now this is just a brief overview I have a great video that I'll link down below uh James Wright from wood by Wright has made some amazing videos that I'll link as well but the way it works is you immobilize your board on a bench like this you take your longest hand plane whatever it might be this is as long as I get a a number eight and you're going to take it or another straight edge you're going to kind of look and see I can tell that we are high on the ends I'm going to take those down uh just a little bit and then I'm going to look again and look again and then when I start to get it real close I'm going to use what are called winding sticks this is a very rudimentary version they get real cool people make them real custom but essentially it's uh two sticks of equal size and one is a different color than the other and the reason you do that it's sort of like looking out at the Horizon right if you look out at the Horizon and you look down and you look even you can see when they are different heights so you can use these and place them all over your board you know a little bit fur farther apart from each other and you can look down the end and you can see when one corner is higher and all that and you'll start to kind of take stuff down and then finally you'll get it flat definitely the slowest but it's the way people have done it for years and years and years and if you haven't acquired a lot of tools it's a great way to learn how to use your hand planes you certainly would get a lot better practicing that so hey that's how we get flat and parallel faces let's talk about Edge jointing and there's a lot of cool ways to do this and we're going to start by the router table I'm going show you a really cool trick on this router table so now that we've gotten a face flat or two faces flat and perel it's time to Joint The Edge and make it Square to those faces there's a lot of tools that can do this one of my favorites is the router table because if you think about it a router table fence is just a jointer flipped on its side right it's got a cutter head an infeed and an outfeed side so if we can move half of this fence the outfeed side out some and align it with the cutter head we have a jointer so to show you how to do this I'm going to use this really rough saw piece of maple here I'm going to use some blue tape now you can put on the outside of your fence or if you have a fence with a removable sacrificial part of the fence you can put the tape behind it so I'm going to do that right now and I'm going to show you how I line it up so just like the jointer we need to align the furthest portion of our cutter head that is out with the fence and it's really easy to do if you have a bearing guided bit or you know you could do it with a round bit just make sure you rotate it that so that you're not hitting and then I take a ruler a straight edge put it against that bearing in the fence and I adjust my fence accordingly you can see here there's a gap between my straight edge in this side of the fence in feed side and there's not a gap up here and that's how we're going to get our jointed Edge all right and there we go we have a perfectly jointed straight edge that's the easy one to get parallel is then you would just go to your table saw and run this Edge against your fence and you get a perfectly parallel Edge so let's talk about two more ways to get a perfectly jointed Edge one more with the router and then we'll head over to the taable saw last one with the router is easy right if we have a straight edge we can make a straight edge because routers have flush trim bits with bearings on it we could use bushings again style points if you already have a flat face because since you are double stick taping template to that same with the router table you're going to have a square Edge as well so you'll have a jointed Square Edge to one of your faces so let me show you how this works I'll use the flush trim bit or maybe I'll use both you'll see me use [Music] [Applause] [Music] both all right last one at the bench is going to be a hand plane and that one's also real simple very much like a face you're going to use a known flat Edge you're going to start jointing now couple tips to give you success and cut down on the frustration here for every full stroke all the way through that you take take a few off the end there's some Physics which is I explained in my hand plane video I'll link below where you start to get a trailing Edge the other thing is it's real easy to get out of square and you may be going this way over here and this way over here so check square a lot while you're doing it lastly if you really want to uh make sure you're Square I made this God when I first got started it's basically just a bunch of magnets at 90° I got a couple notches for the blade and it just sticks on like that and it's going to hold your plane perfectly Square so the other thing that is really helpful is how you hold your hand so if you're left-handed hold your right hand like this and that keeps your fingers against the edge of the board and that's going to keep your plane centered same thing over here so just go until you get a full shaving lastly the table saw now it is dangerous to run an edge that is not straight along your fence and so for all of these Edge joining techniques your next step would be the fence of the table so you take that straight edge and then you rip off a clean Edge on the other which was what makes them parallel but if you want to do it all in the table so you need to start by getting a flat Edge there's a couple ways to do that but the premise is all the same and that is you mobilize the board without it being against anything and you cut off a straight edge this is the cats Moses multi-led I I'll link plans down for this uh down in the pin comment they're free uh it could be something as simple as something that runs against your fence or has a runner and you use some double stick tape to stick your piece down but just going to rip a clean Edge let me show you how we do [Music] it [Music] and for posterity sake we use the cross cut sled to get the ends but now that piece of garbage slab we started with is flat parallel and square do you need a joiner no do they save time of course but you can definitely get by with some of the tricks we showed you in this video reminder these videos are only supported by people visiting our website is how we can afford to have no sponsors here no fluff and no BS so guys thanks for watching stay safe in the shop there we go nailed [Music] it

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 133,278

Keywords: woodworking, jointer sled, table saw jointer jig, rough cut lumber, rough sawn lumber, how to joint without a jointer, planer sled, rough lumber, straight edge jig, face jointing without a jointer, jointing jig, jointer jig, jointer sled for planer, jointer jig table saw, edge jointer jig, table saw jig for jointing, planer sled for longboards, how to joint wood without a jointer, do it yourself, jointer jig for router, planer sled for warped wood, tapering jointing jig

Id: a8_A7W7QVtk

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2023