Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Hand or power tools?

I was just prepping some wood for a home project. Ran it thru the jointer, and it looked pretty good, all clean and smooth, but.. It wasn't square. One edge was definitely thicker than the other. In fact I could see by eye that the board was tapered from side to side, like a clapboard.
Jointer can't fix this. Jointer will make board faces flat, but it does nothing about making 'em parallel. Proper power tool for that job is a thickness planer, which I don't own.
So, break out a hand plane. Clearly a job for the big 24 inch long try plane. It's a beautiful Record I inherited from my mother. It probably costs more than my jointer did. The iron was sharp, and with a little adjustment of depth-of-cut and blade angle, it was making paper thin curly shavings running the length of the board. I'm not a real hand plane pro, what little I know was taught to me in middle school shop class and that was a long time ago. But, it only took a couple of minutes to square up a four foot plank.

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