Hi! I’ve only posted here maybe once, but I’m looking to change that and have been working to improve my joinery.
Specifically, I recently had the geometric realization that adjusting the horizontal angle on my miter saw is one of the least precise adjustments I can make, when trying to make two cuts that add up to 90 degrees. So instead, I now set the angle for the smaller angle, make the first cut, then set the workpiece for the second piece using a square against the fence. Basically, I’m rotating the piece so it’s 90 degrees to the saw fence, and that lets me cut the complementary angle without realigning the saw angle.
The new problem is that because I’m still using slightly-warped and slightly-twisty stock, the surfaces aren’t terribly great for gluing up. In one case, I glued up one end of a diagonal brace but the other end was lifting up, off-plane. Hand sanding with a block helps, but more often than not, I end up rounding off the edges and glue leaks out. So I’m now seeking recommendations for a small hand plane, so that I can have better, flatter surfaces to glue together.
Is this the right approach? If I’m mostly working with narrow stock like 1x4-inch, is there a correct-sized hand plane to smooth out an end-grain on that small of stock? Apologies in advance for not really knowing all the right wood terminology. I’m still learning.
Ideally, I’d like to buy something that will be versatile and serviceable for a long time. So cost isn’t too important, but ideally it’d be proportional to my (few) other tools. If I know what to look for, I’ll keep my eye out for such a specimen while at the thrift store.
EDIT: To clarify, a use-case would be if I’m gluing a diagonal brace at mid-height of a post. If i had a plane, I could work the post so that it has a flat face, so that the brace won’t deviate left/right. For the diagonal brace itself, I can mostly trust my miter saw to cut the angle reasonably plumb.
EDIT 2: Might I actually want a card scraper instead?
EDIT 3: y’all are awesome and I now have a fair number of suggestions to consider. I guess there goes all my disposable money for September, once I go visit the nearby woodworking shop.
Oh, and about card scrapers:
Think of a card scraper as similar to fine sandpaper. They’re used to smooth and maybe slightly shape a nearly finished surface. not having a sole, you’re probably going to make a surface less flat than more flat. A cabinet scraper, which is a card scraper in a handle, might be a replacement for a smoothing plane. As in, instead of sanding before finishing, you scrape.
Card scrapers are sharpened differently to other tools, they cut with a burr. In most blades, you sharpen to a razor edge by abrading the burr thinner and thinner until it becomes molecule thin. With a card scraper, you first make the edge of the steel perfectly square, and then you burnish the edge to produce an engineered burr. Which is a whole other skill.
Card scrapers have their uses but put a pin in that for awhile and circle back to it.
Abstract: You probably want to buy a #4 or #5 bench plane, buy or build a shooting board, and possibly want a good quality square, straight edge, and a pair of winding sticks.
It sounds to me like you’ve got two distinct problems, both of which can be solved with a hand plane or two.
Slightly-warped and slightly-twisty stock
I saw a major jump in the quality of my woodworking when I bought my jointer and planer and with it the capability of milling stock properly flat, straight and true. I imagine you will as well. Truing stock with hand planes is a skill older than the English language and I recommend every woodworker learn how to do it with a hand plane, even if you are a Norm Abram style power tool enthusiast.
I’m going to let my main man Paul Sellers describe the process, as he’s a better authority on the subject than I am.
You will see hand tool gurus talk about all the hand planes you can get, “first I use my scrub plane, then my #8 jointer, then my #5 jack, and then my #4 smoother” It’s probably nice to have a bunch of planes for a bunch of uses but you can get the job done with a #4 or #5 set up as a jack plane. I’ve never seen Paul Sellers pick up a two foot long jointer plane. You’ll need to get or make some winding sticks, a decent try square, and a straight edge, and you can straighten a board of any size, given enough cardio. Or, do like I did and buy a jointer and a planer.
Trying to make two cuts that add up to 90 degrees.
So, as long as your miter saw’s fence is straight, if you cut one board on one side of the blade, and the other on the other, those angles should be complementary/supplementary. Say your miter saw is swung to 44 degrees rather than 45. Well the other side should be 136, or if you invert the board, 46 degrees.
Another way of saying that is, take a straight board, set the saw to somewhere aroudn 45 degrees, cut the board, flip one side over, and it should always come out square. But, this isn’t always satisfactory.
You absolutely can use a hand plane to true up the end of a board correcting for any imperfection in a sawing operation. You can do this by hand cutting to marking lines, but I recommend using a shooting board.
A shooting board is a simple jig used to guide a plane precisely past the work, quite often holding teh stock at a 90 or 45 degree angle to the plane such that the plane cuts the end of the work to the desired angle. I made one just to try it out and I use it all the time. You can use a standard bench plane with these, you probably want to make sure the sides of the sole are square to the bottom if you’re going to use a plane for shooting, or make sure your plane has a lateral adjust. I’ve often seen it recommended that you use a low angle plane for shooting or other end grain work but a standard bevel down plane will do. I sometimes use my block plane with my shooting board.
In addition to miters, I use my shooting board when I need the end of a board to be extremely square, like for a board that is going to be butt jointed or tenoned.
So what about the plane itself?
You’ll see planes sold as #4 “smoothing” or #5 “jack” planes. The #5 is slightly longer and wider. Either will do for our purposes here, strictly speaking you can do everything you need with a #4. My #4 is a Pony Jorgensen I bought from Lowe’s. I understand the planes offered by Taylor Toolworks are of similar bang-for-buck quality. Or you can spend $400 on an eye wateringly beautiful plane from Lie Neilson.
A standard bevel-down #4 and a low angle #5 can be a good combo to have. I also keep a low angle block plane around, it’s handy for breaking edges and other miscellaneous tasks.
Accessories
You will need some method of sharpening the iron. The same method you use for your chisels will most likely work. I find sharpening methods to be kind of personal; some people like oil stones, some people like water stones, some people like diamond plates, some people like lapping paper, some people like Tormek or other machinery-based solutions, and they’re all right. All of those methods work well, it’s up to you to find the one that works for you in your shop. I’m personally a diamond plate guy, though for very coarse work I do use sandpaper.
Firstly, thank you for such a detailed reply!
This far, my woodworking would not be described as “fine woodworking” but rather as “coarse woodworking” haha. That is, I’m mostly putting together functional pieces where it’s permissible to be ugly-as-sin but should be structurally sound. Hence why I initially only considered fixing up the joints, to make wavy bits of wood come together.
You’ll need to get or make some winding sticks, a decent try square, and a straight edge, and you can straighten a board of any size, given enough cardio. Or, do like I did and buy a jointer and a planer.
But I take your point that a jointer and planer (is there such a thing as a combo?) would be fixing the root issue, with additional benefits. Certainly, if I could get my positional precision tighter than 1/8-inch deviation from my plans, I’d be thrilled. I may later circle back for these tools, after trying hand planing for a few pieces.
So, as long as your miter saw’s fence is straight, if you cut one board on one side of the blade, and the other on the other, those angles should be complementary/supplementary. Say your miter saw is swung to 44 degrees rather than 45. Well the other side should be 136, or if you invert the board, 46 degrees.
This part makes sense, and there’s much that I should adjust on my miter saw. Let me expand on exactly what I was trying to do last time that necessitated some geometric creativity. Basically, I wanted a cut where the miter saw would be turned 70 degrees, then another cut at the complementary 20 degree. My saw can only swing left or right by about ~60 degrees. So that’s why I set the saw for 20 degrees to the right, fed the piece from the left side. Then for the 70 degree cut, fed the piece from the front into the saw, such that I get the complementary angle of 70 even though the saw is still set at 20.
For reference, this is how pointy the 70 deg was to look. The 20 deg cut is not pictured.
A shooting board is a simple jig used to guide a plane precisely past the work, quite often holding teh stock at a 90 or 45 degree angle to the plane such that the plane cuts the end of the work to the desired angle.
TIL a shooting board. It also answers the question of how I’d keep a hand plane steady if the end grain might be quite small. And I could use my new hand plane to help construct a shooting board.
I suspect I now have projects for all remaining weekends of this month lol! Thank you again!
You are very welcome!
Yeah cutting extreme angles like that on a miter saw can be tricky; if using a 45 degree auxiliary fence you want to make sure you’re holding the work safely. I have a miter gauge for my table saw that swings through 180 degrees, so I’d probably use that, especially given how loose my little miter saw is.
Power planers and jointers
Trying not to write a dissertation on this subject, Thickness planers and jointers, like all power tools, do the job of a hand tool with less physical effort. Just like a cordless drill doesn’t magically make perfect holes, a thickness planer doesn’t magically make straight boards. There’s techniques to them, you have to know what you’re doing. Some things to keep in mind with power planing:
- A jointer can make one face of a board flat, and one edge flat and 90 degrees to that face (most have adjustable fences that can do other bevels, but you’ll mostly have it set square). That’s it. Jointers can’t do parallel.
- A jointer is not very good at flattening convex surfaces, because they can rock as they go over the tool. For bowed or cupped boards, you want to joint the hollow side down.
- A jointer can only truly flatten a board that is up to twice as long as the infeed table. Beyond that it might trend toward a very large radius rather than truly flat. You may need to mostly flatten a board some other way before finishing it on a short jointer, or if this board is destined to be cut up, cut it into smaller lengths and joint them separately.
- A thickness planer isn’t actually very good at making boards flat. It makes boards thinner, and while it’s doing that, it tends to make the top face more parallel to the bottom face.
- Given a board with a flat bottom face, a thickness planer is pretty good at making the top face parallel to the bottom face, and thus making the top face flat.
- Given a board with a non-flat bottom face, the thickness planer is going to make the board thinner, and the top face smoother, but who knows what it’ll do to the overall shape.
- A thickness planer is very bad at taking bow or cup out of a board by itself. The rollers tend to mash the board flat, the cutter head cuts it thinner, and then the board springs back bowed or cupped once out of the machine, maybe with some added snipe for your trouble.
Knowing their capabilities and limitations, you can use them together to surface 3 sides of a board. That fourth side can be ripped on a table saw and then you’ve got an S4S board.
To jointer or not to jointer?
A thickness planer does a job that is difficult to do with hand tools or other power tools, reducing the thickness of wide boards. I have no other tool that could take a quarter inch off the thickness of a 10 inch wide board; the only tool I have that is appropriate for this task is my thickness planer.
A jointer on the other hand isn’t that difficult to do without; hand planing one face flat isn’t that big of a chore, and there’s a lot of ways to straighten and square an edge. A table saw with a taper jig can do it, and you can set up a router table as a jointer, just sideways with the cutter vertical instead of horizontal. Sometimes I like doing that because it’s easier to support the stock laying flat on the table rather than balanced up on edge.
Combo units do exist, though I tend to prefer to have the tools separate. A combo planer/jointer often has short jointer beds, and the jointer surface is high up off the floor which I find less ergonomic to use. But, in a small shop it might be worth it for the compactness factor.
Living with power planers
So, power saws are loud, dusty, electricity demanding machines. Power planers are the next level. My thickness planer is the loudest, thirstiest, dustiest power tool I own. It is outright painful to be near the thing without hearing protection. I’m honestly surprised it’s UL listed with a 5-15 plug on it given the current it pulls. And the manual outright states a shop vac is not adequate, you need a dust collection system. Building that cupboard I posted about not too long ago, I filled a 60 gallon trash can with planer shavings and sawdust.
Hand planing produces lots of chips and shavings but not as much dust, and it’s quieter.
Also, planers tend to be rather heavy. Mine weighs about 100 pounds. If your shop would require you to stow this tool a lot, it can be a problem.
It took me a few reads to internalize everything that you wrote, and it’s food-for-thought for when I level-up to adding another machine to my garage. It does seem that I can wait on the jointer for a long while, and on the thickness planer until my projects start using wider boards or I get really tired of hand planing those.
Good to know that the combo planer/jointer is not exactly optimal, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for either separate machine that happens to be for sale on the used market.
I have no other tool that could take a quarter inch off the thickness of a 10 inch wide board; the only tool I have that is appropriate for this task is my thickness planer.
As it happens, this was precisely what I also had to do for an earlier project, and I ended up using my router table to do it. It was an awful slog of a time, and I hope to never repeat that ever again. Throughout the ordeal, I kept thinking about how a CNC mill would have made quick work of it, but I suspect a used thickness planer is going to be a lot more affordable for me
You can build a device that is kind of like a CNC gantry without the motors that allows you to manually move a router over a workpiece. I’ve seen people build those for flattening things that can’t or shouldn’t go through a planer like large slabs or end grain cutting boards etc. but yeah for a normal board a thickness planer is the tool for that job.
Remember: A thickness planer isn’t good at making boards flat by itself, and thickness planers don’t do square. You’ll need some method of flattening and squaring your boards. A jointer is one of many ways to do that. Without a jointer, you’ll need to use one of the many other ways, but the planer alone isn’t enough.
It’s been a while since I bought a plane, but I see two ways of going about it:
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Buy Once, Cry Once. If budget allows, get a Lie Nielsen or something super nice. I personally think the Wood River plans are great, too.
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Refurbishment. Buy an old Stanley from an antique store or estate sale or whatever (not eBay) and restore it. You’ll have to invest in a granite stone to flatten the sole plus some sandpaper, scotch Brite pads, etc. You’re trading money for time and sweat here, but you could end up with a perfectly usable and quality plane.
Either way, a plane is only good as your sharpening system. Invest in something good and easy to use (or you won’t use it).
For your application, I would recommend you first take steps to make your stock as square as possible. If your reference edge has a twist, bow, or cup, trying to plane or shoot something flush is going to be a nightmare.
Check out Paul Sellers or Rob Cosman. They have great educational and instructional videos on YouTube and other platforms and mediums. Hope this was helpful!
You don’t need a granite stone, we’ll at least you don’t need to invest in a super flat one.
Get large format glass or porcelain tile from a big box, or find a company that installs counter tops and does the cutting for stone counters. Ask if you can have an offcut piece of quartz counter top.
Having a cheap, flat surface is great for lots of tool sharpening, and it definitely does not need to be expensive or an investment.
Hmm, I think a nearby recycled building materials store might have exactly this. Do I understand correctly that this offcut would only be used as a smooth, abrasive surface?
Not as an abrasive surface. As a reference surface. If you get adhesive backed sandpaper, you can use a flat surface as a lapping plate, both for flattening the sole of a plane, flattening the backs of chisels and plane irons, and as a surface to sharpen blades on.
I actually use a piece of plate glass from the home center, but I’ll admit it’s less than ideal.
Ah! That makes much more sense
If you don’t have adhesive backed sand paper, you can also get a can of spray adhesive. Doesn’t need to be the super strong stuff.
At last, my collection of 3M Super 77 comes in handy!
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Hmm, one thing the other posts might not have addressed is what kind of wood are you using? Are you using construction 1x4s? If you use wood that is already straighter and square , it reduces how much work you’ll need to get things working.
Note also that wood is flexible to a degree, so you can with the correct joints and clamping get things to fit.
Yes, most of what I typically have on hand is dimensional lumber. So it’s already mostly alright, but the surfaces might not all be square and I need to figure out ways to keep those errors from propagating.
Something to consider is to modify your plans to consider small errors. What kind of joints are you able to produce? Can you cut straight lines at a consistent depth?
Btw if you need the miter saw to cut a larger angle you can use an existing known angle as an insert.
WoodRiver Medium Shoulder Plane - # 92. I’ve had one of these for years, and it’s my favorite go to plane. Great for adjusting joints of all kinds, and about a billion other things.
That plane is gorgeous. To be clear, you would recommend this plane not just for my described use-cases but for all sorts of things, if I could only buy just one plane at this time?
Not the person you replied to, but a shoulder plane is kind of specialized tool. The blade goes all the way to the edge of the shoe, which lets you plane right up to square corners, such as a tenon, and the shoe is narrow, which lets you plane into grooves, such as dadoes, where general purpose planes won’t fit. The narrow shoe means you have to pay a lot more attention to keeping the plane square/flat to the surface, and the relatively short shoe means you have to pay a lot more attention to overall flatness of your work piece. If you need to true-up twisted & warped wood, a general-purpose bench plane will be a lot easier.
This person has it right. I’d still recommend this for your use case, as typical planes cannot work on joint adjustment or endgrain very well. The #92 is not going to be the best plane for flattening or trueing stock, a larger plane would do that more easily and quickly. The #92 can do a lot of things better than others, and it has a few tricks normal planes connot do, like cutting all the way into the corner of a joint, or evening out the profiles of two joined pieces (like a joint in crown mould). The body of the plane is square to the sole, making 90° easily achievable by riding the side of the plane on an adjacent 90° surface. As a huge help on the learning curve of woodwork, the small blade, at only 3/4" wide will be much easier for a beginner to sharpen than a two inch wide blade. Sharpening a plane well is the only way to have it work well for you, less effort, less tearout, and of course, the wonderfully unique and not often seen finish produced by a sharp plane cutting the grain as opposed to sanding breaking that same wood grain. I have about a dozen handplanes, including a couple Lie-Nielson (their 1-1/4" rabbet block plane is my second favorite), but the #92 gets more use and has more functions than the rest combined. I could talk about my sweetheart for days, but what you probably want to do is scoot down to Woodcraft and get some planes in your hands. What works and feels best for me may be, or may not be for you. I can say confidently that if you get to use the #92, you won’t be disappointed.
Thank you for the detailed clarification!
In review, it sounds like a shoulder plane would prove its worth for very small, fiddly work that a general-purpose plane couldn’t reach, but it would be slower for flattening the poor stock that I often use. Would this mean a shoulder plane plus a machine planer be a reasonable combination, with the latter introduced later to enable larger-scale flattening?
The body of the plane is square to the sole, making 90° easily achievable by riding the side of the plane on an adjacent 90° surface
This might be the feature which sways my decision, since I think it means I can devise a simple jig for any size of stock by clamping to a known flat surface (or even just a surface that’s more flat than the stock) and guide the shoulder plane that way, to prepare for joining. I didn’t mention in my original post, but I also occasionally do “coarse metalworking” where all the stock I use is already nice and straight and flat, which would make good guiding surfaces for a shoulder plane (on wood lol).
Yes. A machine planer will not remove warp, twist, or bow from wood, it just takes the wood to a very certain thickness repeating whatever shape the wood riding on the bed has. You need a machine called a jointer to quickly straighten and square stock before it is run through a machine planer. A jointer is a machine with a steeper learning curve than a planer, but it will not be as steep as learning to eyeball and flatten stock with a handplane.
Yeah, you are on the right track thinking about riding the side of the plane on a guide. This is typically called a shooting block, and is not limited to 90°. You can make a guide of any angle and those wide sides make it really easy to maintain consistency.
Thanks for this additional detail! I’m currently leaning on going with the shoulder plane, with intention to add a machine planer in future for dealing with larger material all at once. Would that be a sound plan?
Word of warning: A shoulder plane does not work with a shooting board. A shoulder plane is a very handy tool to have but it has a special purpose. They’re great at tuning the shoulders and cheeks of tenons, for example.
I figured that a shoulder plane and shooting board would be two disparate tools, but for my own knowledge, I haven’t figured out why exactly a shoulder plane with a shooting board doesn’t work. Is it because a shoulder plane tends to be short?
The captain is referring to the fact that if your guide, or shooting board is riding under the sole of the plane, the plane will damage the shooting board because the blade goes from edge to edge, unlike a typical plane which has small pieces of the sole on both sides of the blade that prevent it from cutting too deeply into the shooting board. With a rabbet plane you run any guide on the side to prevent the guide’s destruction. The Captain is correct that a traditional shooting board does not work as well with a traditional shooting board setup, however even this can be ameliorate by simply skewing your plane at a 25° angle to your forward motion, and the sole will then be partially out of line with the blade, and act as the small pieces of sole on either side of the blade to limit the depth of cut.
Oh, I see. So a shoulder plane’s blade actually has exposure on three sides, and can cut the bottom and the sides simultaneously?
Yes. See my other, more lengthy reply in this thread:)
