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.
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.