ok heres the story.
i bought my self a bit of european beech and the faces came pre serfaced which left me to square up the edges. this is where my problem bigings. my dad and i are slowly building up our shed to become more of a work shop and all we have is a bandsaw and a buch of old hand saws and an old smoothing plane. i thought i did ok planing the edge down but when i looked at it more it still is wavey. so what do you recomend to get my edges to be perfect or at least really close to perfect with what i have.
thanks for any help you can give me.
Aidan 🙂
Replies
Hi Aidan,
Sorry not to respond to you more quickly. I'll try to get you a response soon.
One solution would be a shooting board. It's a jig that works in conjunction with hand planes to fine tune workpieces. We just published an article about how to make one: http://www.taunton.com/finewoodworking/subscription/Workshop/WorkshopArticle.aspx?id=30678
But, given the tools you have available, you might have some trouble making it... I'll see what other solutions I can round up for you.
Best wishes with stocking your shop...
Gina
FineWoodworking.com
Sorry for not responding sooner, but our quaint tradition of having to file tax forms by April 15 took up all my time over the past few days. The other problem is that this question requires a large answer, I could easily write 10,000 words on the subject.
First of all if you are going to be using hand tools, primarily planes, to shape wood you will need to get the planes working well and you will have to be able to sharpen it efficiently. You will find that searching through the back issues and videos here on the FWW site that there is a lot of information on the subject. You do not need to get the sole of your plane flat within a thousandths of an inch, that is just a fetish of some tool tweakers, but the plane needs to be sharp and properly adjusted.
Secondly, just because you got the stock presurfaced that is no guarantee that it is still flat by the time you get to gluing it up. So the first skill you will need to acquire is how to check and flatten the wide face of the board. Again look on this site for information on "preparing stock" or searching the for term "winding sticks", which are a tool for testing flatness, will get you the information you need. Once you get the face of a board flat then getting a pair of edges straight enough for gluing, again using a plane, is relatively easy.
John White
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