Squaring Timber By Hand | The Chopping Board #2

hello everyone in this video we're going to be establishing a face side and a face edge on all three bits of this timber let's go so cleaning a flat face on a bit of wood and planing a square edge is obviously very easy on a planer or joint or whatever you just run it over the bed a few times then you stick the flat face up against the square fence run that through and voila you've got a face side of face edge unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that with a hand plane there is a little bit of an act of it so I'm going to show you how to do that in this episode - the vise so I'm going to start with this bit of oak which is the middle laminate sort of see to push them of bench dogs up I've actually got the bench pup still so they're really sure I need to upgrade to the bench dog so I can actually reach them through the underside of the workbench so get them in there and then dump them between the dogs and just make sure that we're reading the grain correctly there is no grain on here so I'm going to even bother with that if you want to know a little bit more about grain directions and all things like that I did a video on reducing tear out with hand planes so I'll put the link to that in the top corner that will show you how to read grain direction on the edge here and also sharpening one of these bad boys and a standard plane to reduce terror so here we've got the face side which you're going to plane down first don't worry over too much if you remove those marks on there because we've got the little V on the face edge here that shows that is where the face side was so let's just tidy up to start with and get rid of all these saw marks on here you might be able to see those metal arrays becoming a little bit more visible now they look beautiful almost there just got a little bit above this not ready to get rid of okay so that's pretty much all cleaned up now no saw marks on there and it's nice to smooth but do not rely on that being perfectly flat because although we're able to get a plane across the entire surface we can't guarantee if that surface is out of twist which is a bit of a nightmare to remove how do you remove that well that is what the winding sticks do here it's when these winding sticks you've got one face that's like a matte black color and you've got a shiny silvery surface here if you make these out of woods make sure to make them out of contrast and materials so say there's no ash and walnut but what you want to do is make sure you have one color at the front and the opposite color at the back so here I've got silver at the front black at the back or you could just have it the other way around black at the front silver at the back it also makes this a little bit easier if you put a board or something behind so you haven't got to read it against the background of whatever it is over here what these winding sticks are going to do is if there is any twists in this board it's gonna amplify it and write out on these ends it's gonna really show it so if I bend down now and slide along it I can see if any of those sides of the winding sticks are poking up higher than the other it is very difficult to focus at this point that you've just gotta get it as close as you can like be really perfectionist about this annoyingly this bit of oak is actually pretty perfect well it's good for me but for the demonstration purposes that's quite bad but if anything this side here is sticking up like the tiniest amount like a stupid amount that I could almost leave it but we're going to be perfectionist about this so get rid of those winding sticks because this side was higher here it could also mean that this side was possibly high so what we're going to do is get our plane and we're just gonna play in diagonally now the way I've sharpened this blade is with a small curve on it so it means that wherever i Center that plane on the wood it's going to take the material from there and it's not going to take any material from the edges of the blade so next to the cut I'll show you how to do that in my video how to get a stupidly sharp edge on a plane blade so have a look at that links in the top corner now but I'm going to reverse from this high spot to that high spot and it's probably anyone's a 1 probably bit now the other thing still here because that's lowered this surface and lowered this surface we might have a small bump in the middle of this bit of wood so when we put the winding stick on it might start rocking so another advantage with the curve on the blade is that I can go straight down the middle and only take the material from that center section without leaving any tracks on the edges here I can just go straight down when it stops cutting I know that I've got a small Hollow in the middle here and when I put the winding steps on it's going to rest on the two high points either side of this material and therefore you're just going to get a much more stable readout from the winding sticks so looking at this again that one shaving has thrown it out a massive amount compared to what it was before so you might be able to see it if I stick up the camera now so as I start lowering this camera watch that back winding stick look at the horizontal lines on it to start with so right about there you see on the right hand side it's pretty much touching that line but on the left hand side it's a little bit off on that silver one so that's another great advantage of these metal winding sticks they have those lines but if I keep going down and look at the right-hand side until that silver bit just disappears on the black winding stick on the left there you see that it's still sticking proud by quite a bit so it was pretty much perfect before and one shaving diagonally has done that so what I'll have to do is reverse what I've done do a diagonally in the opposite way and take that twist back out so get rid of the winding sticks so this side and this side are high now obviously so we could do a diagonal stroke now sometimes with this what you can do is you can take this high point off and then this size high and then you have to go back to that one and then you just end up chasing your tail if that happens just bear in mind that when you remove material from both corners you're effectively removing two high spots and you're removing that twist by two times so if you find yourself in that stage where you just keep jumping between the two high edges firstly you can try and reduce the cut on your plane blade or start your plane in the middle of the board and just take off one of the high corners then you're only getting half an adjustment as opposed to an entire adjustment so this one what I'm going to do is back off the plane blade and I'm going to go call its corner but with a really really light cut okay that was literally the smallest shaving possible but I reckon that's all it will take and I'll just do a couple more down the center as well just to make sure there's no Peaks on there get the wine mystic set up and check again that's still a little bit high so we're gonna go again right that was quite a big shaving so I think that's gonna do it and again that has created a peak in the middle because now unable to take shavings out and there we go after one will pass that's looking pretty good and with both ends out of twist it's always good to just check along the board as well so keep the front one where it is and just move the back once different place along the board it's also worth mentioning here just make sure that they are perfectly parallel across the width of the board as well it's all fine there a little bit just move it up in about two inch intervals now weirdly enough of all places I've actually got a small bump here by the looks of it it's actually sitting proud ever so slightly yeah this winding stick here is sitting a little bit proud so again because I've got a small curve on the blade just a little nibble out of that area yeah that's all it needed so now we know this component is all in one plane along the top there's no twist in it whatsoever but because we've been attacking these two corners there's a small chance that we have a small arc in this timber even though it's all in line and there's no twist in it we can still have a bump and a way to check that is obviously with a straight edge you can put it on there and if you feel yeah it's pivoting in the middle so we do have a small bump there but it doesn't even feel like the straight edge is rocking but the fact that it pivots in that center section again I can hold it out here and it's still pivots in the middle there shows that there is a small high spot there if you don't have a straight edge you can also use the corner if you play just rest it on there like that and again it's pivoting in that area so that's nice and simple to get rid of again it really helps having a curve on the blade here start the plane in the middle of the wood straight down the middle let's start making those shavings a little bit longer until you get on the entire length of the board and just take out any smooth potential bumps in the middle so that would probably be it now if I put the plane on there yeah I can hear I get my microphone nearby that the whole plane is rubbing along the surface now another really good trick here I like to do is turn on a flashlight on your phone or a torch or whatever tilt the plane up so you create a really dark shadow along this surface here and then simply just shine a light behind and I can see on that end there that we do have a bump around this area it was a bit of debris there but again yes there is a bump around that area if I shift it along here very small pockets of light showing through but really not enough to worry about more the openness of the grain that's doing that so yeah we've got something going on here so it just means I'm gonna plane that top surface there so yeah that's a lot better there and along here yeah that's this flattest needs to be now something I forgot to mention earlier is obviously not a lot of you are fortunate enough to have access to a massive roubo workbench with a tail vise on it so a great alternative to this would be to get yourself a drill most of you have these in your garage and some sort of drill guide pop that in there and grab yourself a three-quarter inch or nineteen millimeter Forster bit and just drill a few dog holes in the top of your workbench and then what you can do is grab yourself a Veritas wonder dog which I overlay on the screen now and also a pack of bench pups or bench dogs and then what you have is a portable tail vise that you can use at any point on your workbench and it's a great alternative to what I have here this is just a bit more permanent the wonderdog are used for years on my crappy workbench at home before I made this thing it's obviously a lot easier using a tail vise but in terms of budget much easier to get yourself a wonder dog all we've got to do now is get the edge square so again clamp it between the dogs and again we're just going to get rid of the saw marks not so here I'm going over that deadlock so it's providing a little bit of resistance but we've got a nice sharp plane is okay right so marks will removed on there now what a lot of people were tempted to do now is get the winding sticks on there and check for twists again and there is actually no point to that whatsoever the reason we're being so perfectionist about this faced edge here is because that is going to be our reference surface well because that is going to dictate what all three of the rest of these sides do it's what we've got to do is get a square on it of course that's the case right so we've got to do is get a square on there but using the reliable face we've created here we can just check if that edge is square or not so looking along it it's pretty good for the most part although by the looks of it the square is slightly like rocking back like this which means that this edge here is high by a very small amount so a great way of checking if this is square or not is looking at a lovely light source a pocket on LED panel there is hold the wood ups the light like that and then pop you we're on it and it's going to make it very visible which side is higher so we can see here that the right-hand side and the serial is higher however if I shift it towards the back you maybe I'd see here that the left-hand side is ever so slightly higher so if that's the case what you want to do is just grab a pen and scribble on the areas that are high so it's the right-hand side along here slightly and the left-hand side up here and then you can crank that between your docks again and again another advantage to having the curve on the blade is that I can focus it exactly on that area I want to remove so shaving along there shift it across and there we go one shaving let's just check that again and that is all it needed which is pretty good now being square is all very well much like being out of twist is all very well on the front face but we still don't know if there's a bow in it whatsoever so let's get a straight edge on there yeah that's pivoting in the middle again so we do have a high spot in there so that means that all we've got to do is again start the plane in the middle do some small shavings and then eventually elongate those shavings to take a full leg shaving and as you're doing this just make sure that you're not throwing it too out of square as you go so that's pretty good you just got to check it as you go while we're moving that boat okay that was a full length shaving get the straight edge on there there you go so it's scraping again that's means that it's touching on both corners then we'll just check to see if it's square again so still all square there right so the left-hand side is a little bit higher so just do a small shaving there maybe just one more cool right that's all good along there and we'll just do one last check for this yep all scraping along there and there you go guys that is how you're playing a face side of face edge on a bitten but but do not go yet stay because do not assume that that is the way to do these opposite faces if you use the same methods we just used on making this edge square on the opposite face you're going to start encountering various problems similarly if you start claiming this side flat you're going to encounter problems there as well so I'll go over that in the next episode of how to do that properly it is not the same rules so anyway that's the bit of oak done I'm going to attack the beach in its own time exactly the same rules of the beach face side and then face edge I'll see this face side is a little bit wider than it is on the oak here so when you're planing it maybe get a plane across the width of it as well and just make sure that there's no rocking it that way as well and obviously if you find any high points just scrub them out of the Jesus pen but same rules apply get the twist out of it make sure there's no bow in it make sure there's no bow in it that way square off one edge and then watch my next video I will see you then [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 101,848

Rating: 4.9440231 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, hand made project, woodworking by hand, woodwork hand tool project, make a chopping board, making a chopping board, how to make a chopping board by hand, hand made, cutting wood, beech, beginner woodwork, beginner woodworking projects, beginner hand tool projects, start woodworking, budget woodworking, cheap woodwork project, easy woodwork project, how to make a chopping board with hand tools, how to use a hand plane, how to flatten wood

Id: C4aimRp9V34

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018