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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.