Milling Rough Lumber Without a Jointer Using a Few Simple Jigs

in my shop tour video i mentioned that i don't have a jointer so then i got a ton of requests to make a video to show how i mill rough lumber without one so here it is when you buy rough lumber like this there are no straight or square edges the board might also be twisted cupped or bowed not good for building and just like there are four sides to a board the milling process is going to be done in four steps so the first step in the milling process after rough cutting to length is to make one face of the board flat the ideal tool to do this is a jointer but we could get around not having the right tools with just using a few simple jigs for this first step i used a super simple jointer jig at the planer and you might be wondering if i have a planer why can't i just send the board through it just like this that's because a planer simply makes one face parallel to another face so if you have a board that has a twist in it and you send it through the planer the cutters are going to follow whatever is on the bottom of the board so your board is going to come out smooth on top but it will still have a twist in it same thing for a cup or a bow this happens because inside the planer there are these rollers that put so much pressure on the wood to help feed the wood through and since there's so much pressure it flattens out the boards if there's a cup or a twist or a bow as it's cutting the top but when it comes back out the other side it's going to spring back to shape and it's going to have that same twist that it had when you sent it in so that's where this jointer jig comes in handy and it cannot be any simpler it's just a piece of scrap that's attached to a long flat piece of mdf i got this idea from colin at woodwork web so i'm going to link down to his video below he has a ton of information on this so here's how it works you take the board that you want flattening and you find all of the high spots you could do that by seeing that the board is rocking back and forth you could clearly see a visible gap there just take a shim and put it underneath it and now when you try to rock it it's no longer rocking and it's stable so this board just has a twist in it but it would be different for something that has a a cup or a bow like a board like this you could see over here this board is cupped as well so i like to leave these like thin little scraps around here and i just would put them underneath in the middle and get the appropriate thickness for the piece of wood that i'm using so that way it won't flatten out as the rollers are pushing it through the same thing for a a bow you would do it in that direction but for now i'll just use this board make sure that it's not rocking and this one only needs one shim but normally when i'm doing this on like longer boards or rougher boards there's like a lot of shims in different locations and to secure it in place i'll just put a dab of hot glue on either side of it and then press it down this way the hot glue is securing the shim to the board and it's also securing the board to the ship because this board doesn't have so many shims i'll just add some hot glue to these edges just to keep it a little bit more secure now the piece is secure and the cutter heads are going to cut the top of this board parallel to this flat mdf piece instead of the twisted bottom of this board but before sending it through the planer i just want to talk about green direction for a second if you look at the side of the board here you can see that the grain is running one way or the other so this is the direction that i want to feed my work piece into the machine because it will cause less tear out because it's going with the grain if i would try to send it through going this way the cutter heads would then be going against the grain causing tear out this might be hard on pieces where green is running in all different directions like this board over here just try to find the direction that most of the grain is going to set the cutter head i raise it well above the work piece and put the whole thing into the planer then i lower the cutter head until i see that the indicator has hit some material then i do two full turns backwards to raise the cutter head i pull the jig and the work piece out then i go back those full two rotations to get back to that depth and then just to be safe from any high points i'll roll it back a quarter turn i don't do this every time that i use the planer because i think it's easy to see the difference between the rough wood and the freshly cut wood but for video sake i'll just scribble some marks onto the wood here so you can see the progress of how it gets cleaned up now it's ready to go through you can see that the planer has started to clean up all the high points and i'll just continue to lower the cutter head with every pass until i see all those scribble lines disappear [Music] so now the top of this board is parallel with this mdf board and just a note if you don't have a planer and you have a router you can do basically the same thing with a router sled you just shim the board until it stops rocking and then you use the router to flatten the top face let's test to see how flat this board is easily comes up off of the hot glue if any of it gets stuck on the mdf you just chisel it right off now flip it over onto that freshly plain side all right no more rocking awesome i've just done exactly what a jointer would do without using a jointer so the next step in the milling process if you have all the right tools would actually be to use a planer so you take the freshly jointed face and you put that on the bed of the planer and then the second face becomes parallel to that first face so there's going to be nothing different in this step if you have a planer so all you need to do is send the board through using that freshly flattened surface on the bed the cutter heads are going to make this second face parallel to the first one just as a planer is supposed to do and boom i have a board that used to be all twisted and wonky and now there are two faces that are parallel to each other one thing to note here is that my jointer jig is 48 inches long and this has been working for me because i usually rough cut to length before i start this milling process uh one time i needed a super long one so i have actually this super long one here that i only used once for a specific project but this has been working for me so just make yours the same size as the typical projects that you work with before moving on to step three of the mailing process just a quick break to talk about this week's sponsor policy genius so tools like planers and jointers help you turn rough lumber into square stock without them you'll either need to spend extra money at the lumber yard buying surface lumber or spend hours upon hours with a hand plane making them flat and square no offense to anybody who enjoys doing that but i personally like to take 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currently have the best part is that they will do all the work to get you switched for free so i think that that's a pretty cool tool to help you save both time and money so head on over to policygenius.com 3x3 custom to shop the market and compare quotes all right on to step 3 now the board now has two faces that are flat and parallel to each other the next step would be to make one of the edges square to those faces right now this is not even close to square you can see a big gap in there and this maybe is easier this way there we go all right so the right tool to do this would be to use a jointer on the edge like this pretend for a second that this is a jointer like here would be the blade so if you have the face that was already flat against a fence on the back and then you run it along the jointer the blades over here are going to cut this edge square to the face that's against the fence on the jointer so there are a few ways to do this without having a jointer but you might be wondering why you can't just rip the board like this through the table saw and that will create straight edges well it's because the boards that you get rough at the lumber yard they don't have straight edges so you see the straight edge is rocking back and forth so if you would just run that along the fence in your table saw the cut that the blade is going to make is going to follow that curve so you're not going to create straight cuts unless you have a straight reference against the fence one of the ways that i like to do this is with a tapering jig because it has a straight edge that gets referenced along the fence as you make a cut or if it has a miter bar in it it just slides in the miter slot always creating one square edge so this is one of the most common questions that i get how do you know where to align your board onto the tapering jig in order to make that square cut since there's no square references on the board so the answer to that is that it doesn't matter at all where you put the board you can set it up so that it cuts this board into like some weird shape and the this step is only making one edge square to the two faces you're not making the whole board square just yet that's going to happen in step four so this board is a great example to show this to you guys because of this weird corner over here that needs to be cut away so i'm going to put this onto the tapering jig just along where that like wonky edge is and it's going to make like a cut into this board where the result is going to be a really weird not square shape so what i'm looking for here is just an even amount of overhang along the edge has nothing to do with the squareness on either side of the board i'm just cutting off all the bad parts that i don't want then i could lock the fence into place and then use the clamps to lock the board to the jig and now i just need to cut off that edge and just like that this board has one square edge but you can see that it's like a weird shape so the squareness of the whole board doesn't matter at this point this tapering jig is 30 inches long so it works for most of the applications that i need it to but sometimes i need to joint a longer piece and there's an even simpler way to do this so this piece of walnut is longer than the jig so it wouldn't be safe to use this to joint that edge so what i would do is just take a scrap piece of some plywood and i'll use that as the reference against the fence and i'll just use some double-sided tape to temporarily put that board onto that scrap sometimes i'll use hot glue also just depends what kind of mood i'm in and once again this board doesn't have to be straight or square to anything when you're lining it up you just want to make sure that all the parts that you want to be cut off are hanging off the edge then same as before just run it through the table saw and this cut is referencing off of that straight edge from the plywood now that rough edge is all cut away you can just take this off of the plywood and you have a freshly squared up edge and sometimes it might be hard to keep track of all this stuff so i'll just make like a check or some sort of marker symbol so that i know that this is the freshly jointed squared edge sometimes if the piece is really long i use my track saw so this would just run along the edge here making one edge square to this top face this would be the same thing as just using a circular saw with an edge guide and that's actually the way that i used to do it before i got this you can also use a router table as a jointer i actually posted a video a really long time ago on how to do this but basically just imagine that the router table is like a jointer flipped on its edge so the fence over here is actually like the bed of the jointer and you would set the outfeed fence like offset it a little bit just to make room for the amount that you're cutting off so it's actually a really cool process and i'll add the link down below if you're interested in learning more another great way to get around not having a jointer is to just use a straight edge and a pattern bit in your router so if you take a known straight edge like something man-made like plywood or mdf and you double side tape that to a work piece overhanging just slightly then the bearing on this bit is going to ride along this straight edge creating one straight edge on your board on to the last step here so the board has two faces that are flat and parallel to each other and it has one edge that is square to both of those faces and now the last step in the process is to make that opposite edge square to the faces and also parallel to that opposite edge because if you look at the board here at the bottom it's about four inches wide and at the top it's about three inches wide because of that angled cut we did with the tapering jig normally that difference isn't so drastic i just wanted to show you how in that third step where you're just squaring up that first edge it doesn't matter if it's a straight cut at all either at the router table as a jointer or using the pattern bit or any of the other methods where you're using a straight edge against the fence the square edge that was cut in the third step is now going to be against the fence so the cut that i'm doing now is going to do two things it's going to make this edge parallel to the edge that's against the fence and it's also going to make it square to the faces because the blade is at 90 degrees boom square stock so that's basically how you get rough lumber into square usable stock and now it's ready to be used well sort of so everything that i just did i milled it slightly oversized so like maybe like an eighth or a sixteenth really not important exactly how much just slightly oversized and the reason for that is because of moisture content so there's a ton of moisture still in this wood and as you remove layers you're exposing the inner core of the wood which probably has more moisture than the outside so as that outside is going to dry off it might then kink or twist or bow or cup or something like that as you're using it so in order to prevent that after doing this whole process that i just showed you i then bring it inside my house and i stack and sticker it overnight or for a few days so that that top layer that i just milled dries out and then if it does move on me then i could just mill off that tiny little bit and get it to its final dimension and then it's ready to be used so i hope this was helpful for all you guys who don't have jointers i think it's really cool that even if you don't have the right tools there's always a jig or a work around to get the same results while i hope to get a jointer one day and i think it's going to make my life just a little bit easier i think that these are great alternatives if you don't have those tools so thank you guys so much for watching thank you to policy genius for sponsoring this video and i'll see you on the next one before i think i have to sneeze this straight edge is rocking who's calling me you

Channel: 3x3Custom - Tamar

Views: 1,464,638

Keywords: 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: AWOB-WIDkOs

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021