You NEED a SHOOTING BOARD (Here's how to build one!)

hi I'm Rob Koz and welcome to my shop I'm frequently asked about shooting boards I use them a lot I have several and I've designed some things about mine to make it a little more user-friendly I'll share them with you and then we'll go through the process of action making one first of all the materials I use I like MDF for the base it has a nice hard wearing surface doesn't that much this for strength on the edge but on the top surface it wear as well it's stable and it's relatively inexpensive this is actually made out of one-inch so that's even nicer but although it's kind of heavy to move around the second piece I you I like to use Baltic birch a nice stable product again and the reason you have to have the second piece when you use your shooting board this piece has to elevate your wood or your workpiece so that you get into the blade and you get by this area right here where there is no blade on a typical bench plane serve material uses something really hard this is a piece of I think it's jatobá and it's a very dense tropical wood nice and hard that gets a fair bit of abuse over the years if you want to prevent it from getting all marked up or full of dents then you need something nice and hard and I use the same thing although it doesn't need to be down here as a cleat to prevent the shooting board from moving forward when you're using it now one of the couple of a couple of issues I'll start with a minor and end with a major I've always seen shooting boards with the fence back here and the problem is in YouTube teaching new people to do this they would always be moving their plane around like that as a result so what I did is I brought my my fence up here three or four inches so that when you bypass your workpiece you still have some registration area to keep the plane going nice and straight just overall made for a more accurate experience now the other problem took a while to figure out and when I did I had to cure it because it was extremely problematic any time you glue two pieces of wood together you risk creating a stress line which is going to cause a cup or a bow in this case what typically happens is your shooting board ends up being Cup like this if you're using a standard bench plane where the middle of the plane is wider than it is at either end what happens when you put that into an area that is we dish and I'll show you with a square we put a square right here right now that shows being nice and square which means when I put my workpiece in there as long as my blade is parallel to the sole as you get a nice square end and I never have to worry about checking it but the minute that you introduce a cup or your shooting board has a tendency to cup like this because it's wider the plane is wider here than it is on the end when when it's cup it's going to tip out like that and now will you put your square on there but that's extremely exaggerated but that's the situation you end up dealing with and then you have a bevel on the end of your board so it's nice and square you can take a little bit of it out with the plane by adjusting it with your lateral adjustment lever but you don't want to do that you want to have it nice and flat to begin with so what I do is I purposely create my shooting board over a slight mold so that there's always a bit of a crown a crown it'll always lay flat right here and just the weight of using the shooting board will actually push that crown out so it'll be flat but it will definitely avoid the cup the rest of the stuff will show you as we go through this so we're going to move over to table saws he over there so here's my two pieces that I need my MDF I'm actually making this one another 3/4 I don't have any more one-inch and there's my piece of Baltic berths now it's sold as 3/8 but it's Baltic birch so it's metric and actually that's coming in ready to the quarter so maybe this wonderful quarter I don't know alright first thing I want to do is check this and this that's always it's never going to be perfectly flat so is what that tells me is that the board is taped like that on the bottom and try to flip that over and you see how it doesn't move like that so what I'll make sure is that this ends up being my top I'm going to pen a pencil around here I'll mark that and if you want some dimensions I'm going to use this on my bench so it's 24 inches by 12 rarely do I ever need it any wider in fact I made a wider one I end up cutting it down just to reduce the weight because I didn't need that extra width okay so this is if this is 24 by 12 then this piece is going to be 24 same length but I got that cut down to nine seven eight that would give me plenty of area to rest my plane on however what I like to do is cut a little rabbit right along this edge so I'm going to cut this section out over the full length and I will leave that part down there intact what that does is prevent the blade of the plane from cutting into the shooting board all the time and that area right here will actually rest below the blade so to do that set my blade so that it it doesn't need to it doesn't need to protrude this in this direction very much at all in fact that's more than I need and then we'll set this I'm going to set it so that about half okay make sure there aren't any burrs or the battle lay flat [Music] Oh [Music] a little bit more [Music] okay here's what we're looking at now I want this I want to strengthen this so that'll wear better so what I'm going to do is soak this edge with cyan acrylate which is a super glue for would if I could find some give me a second to find it they need to saturate is right here this is the part that's actually going to wear so we'll go in here and just run right along there that'll so wick in there I got this idea from watching Dale nish turn wood and if you got into an area where the wood was punky are starting to rot you could use this stuff and it would go in and make that otherwise soft area really hard and workable alright we'll give that a minute to dry and then we'll go back over the table kay this is ready to glue on so I'm just going to wipe this MDF so because there's a natural curve already in there I'm going to go ahead and put that on there but before I do that I'm going to build up somewhat of a form I'll show you how I do it twelve eight and four sixteen and 21 now it's just for reference now using masking tape I'm going to put eight pieces - okay eight there and then six here maximum - five here and three here and that will create a little bit of a curve when we glue this piece of plywood on and they'll do it on something solid now put that over I've got a call just a piece of mellow mine and I'm going to set that right down there and I'll show you how to work with do this if you don't have a whole lot of clamps now we're going to glue that in place but I don't want it to slide around so I've got a little 20 sink the 23 gauge pin nailer so it'll hold it in place and the clamps are on that leak now spread this glue I just want to get rid of that real quick what if I got excuse me a second I grab that look this stuff looks old now I took a scraper a long time ago and I just kind of a bunch of notches in it with a file and it just works is a good glue spreader [Applause] so shoot that's the side is I didn't actually want to come right to the edge over here because I didn't want to glue in the corner need a little bit more yes I'm is messy now set that aside and take care of it as soon as I've got this done this is my side that is going to have the right got the rabbit cut on it so I'm just going to see if I can't back that glue off right there if you're left-handed you're just going to reverse this now line that up he's are small enough that they won't interfere they'll Bend as this goes over the form now I've got a table of the big jointer so you need anything flat several pieces of MDF glued together woodwork put this piece of melamine on here now if you're done clamps what I'll do is take two strips of plywood and hold them back about an inch from the edge now the pressure is going to go on these and the pressure goes out at about a forty-five so they're pretty close to overlapping and I took some pieces of just two-by-four and I'll put that right there I join to the edge put that one about in the middle now I can come in with one clamp bring that down tight and I've got one that's really deep I shave it for over here shoot and that masking tape will create my mold it's good and tighten and I've got squeezed out I don't have any squeeze out over here which is good but I've got squeezed out on both ends hopefully I'll get a little bit there in the middle we have liked to have gotten that one over a little bit more okay we'll give that about a half hour to set up actually what's happened is this is moved the pins the pins actually didn't hold it so let me grab a clamp that's still wet enough that I can move it this one's okay I'm going to take the pressure off of this one and the one in the middle and what I'll do is I'll just reach across from the other side of the MDF to right here and I can pull that over put it right on there and that will keep it flush okay give that 30 minutes and we'll come back okay this out of the clamps we'll just pull the tape off check to make sure that we got a little bit of a curve and s-sorry put this on the table saw yeah so if you look at that and when you put the we right here if you look when the weight of the plane goes on the air it will push that down but that'll always keep that square now I think I'll trim it up just a little bit now use the table side to do that just to get rid of the glue squeeze-out so this is 12 I'll go just a little less than 12 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] okay now we can put this actually should take that over to the bench and clean it up get rid of the saw mark let's reconvene over there okay put the cleat on the bottom actually we just clean this up real quick need a shooting board to make a shooting board so just check that to protection is parallel to the sole and this is mostly just to get rid of saw mark I got to do this one too now straighten this and then put it up here in my plane to check it see how that's got a pivot point in the middle I don't want that so I'm going to take a section out of the middle I'm going to start here but an inch away from the end and I'll go down to about an inch away from that end and then I'll take a complete path run my fingers in I can feel a little transition mark so please try that again that's better so that'll be the surface that I actually work against so I'm going to glue this one down and I'll clean this one up 50 furthest out marks and we complain the top of this okay this is the wandering shoot let me get something a little bit longer make sure there isn't any debris okay that's better all right so this put an arrow that's going to be my fence face now just playing the saw marks off of this no I've got a huge twist in it I'm going to try to get that out take that that's better now I don't want that edge to be anything less than square so because I had to completely redo what would have been my reference pace let's check this again this would be the one eye glue now we want to get our length right on I'll just clean that up anytime you're playing attract the end grain you've got a cut of tamper on the first side first to protect it from breaking out just enough there to clean that up little bit more okay that's good now this is where that goes now I'm going to glue this in first and then I'll come back and put some screws in it but since the glue acts like a weld I always I always want to glue it problem is trying to glue it and screw at the same time as if they is has a tendency to creep not that I'm going to do that under clamps as well but I'll show you how we treat the the actual fence a little bit differently I'm going to purposely keep that away from that front edge just so I don't have to scrape glue off of that corner now put that approximately where I want it just wiggle it a little bit too little spread the glue around now hold the plane in place put the square on there use the square to hold the two perfectly square each other check and make sure it didn't care move that just a little bit okay now I'm going to sit here and hold this for about five minutes until that glue has enough tack that it'll stay put and then once it's dried 2025 minutes I'll come back in and put some screws in there to make sure it doesn't move this ensures that you get a perfectly square setup all right Ian okay everything's dry so it's ready to put together now I'm I'm going to use three number eight by inch and a quarter on the cleat I already drilled them accidentally drilled too deep on one that's the one that's the plane travels on so I've got to put a wind screw there and for these I'm actually drill from the bottom in just because that Bing is so hard the screws will hold better in the bazinga than they would in the MDF there's a lot more force acting on the fence and there is on that cleat I'm going to move this up a little bit okay now because it's bubinga so hard I went in and drilled a bigger hole in the bubinga so that the spread wouldn't cut up in the bubinga and they would bite into the MDF okay now just cut some champers on this make it a little easier in the hands and you pick it up and then same thing here just under this one of this one maybe I'll take just a little bit off of this okay now we've got a little bit of glue squeeze-out down here I may as well knock that off take a little bit off higher that's where I went through with that countersink bit now you can put a finish on this if you want to preserve it but I don't like this surface being too slippery it's nice to have the board a little bit of resistance here now let me grab a piece of walnut check that square that way screw that way perfect there you go if you weren't talking and telling somebody how to do it takes about 15 minutes to make they start to get beat up you can fix them you can make another one then it'll it'll serve you well and that tipped with my molding it over a form so that it stays at least has a little bit of Cup in it that'll serve you really well I hope you enjoyed this we'll see you next time the shop

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 418,388

Rating: 4.8791585 out of 5

Keywords: shooting board, hand plane, sharpening, woodworking, rob cosman, dovetails, wood, mdf, baltic birch, hand tools, furniture, cabinetmaking

Id: YyfvygylyJg

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017