Hand Planing End Grain
I'm building two boxes for Christmas and spent a good part of today preparing the sides for half-blind dovetails. These were all milled, ripped, and chopped at my brother-in-law's shop, where there are plenty of working power tools, but I needed to be sure the surfaces were prepared for accurate markup.
I checked the lengths of all the side pieces and discovered that somehow the ends for both boxes were off by about 1/8". I suppose I could have swapped them to use the longer ones together and the shorter ones together, but I had already matched the pieces for good grain and color so I decided to modify the lengths until they matched.
Initially I clamped the parts for each box together and hand planed until they were
the same length. Then I realized I had managed to plane them out of square (more on how I did that in a minute), and had to go back to correct that. If you've never done this with a hand plane, there are a couple of tricks that help.
First, make sure that the blade is properly set for parallel. Hopefully your plane has an adjustment lever for this, like mine does, but if not you will have to do this some other way. This was the source of my problem: I have been experimenting with a looser lever cap so that adjustment of the blade is easier and more accurate. Well, it turns out I had made the lever cap too loose and my fingers were moving the blade by gripping it while I planed. Tightening the screw that secures the lever cap by about 1/8 of a turn fixed that problem. I had no more unexplained deviation...
Second, when correcting a problem like I had, start on the high side of the surface and plane progressively across it. By placing the plane mostly off the board edge I was able to re-establish a (very small) square surface and work it across the width of the board until the full piece was square. This is much easier than it sounds,
and when I was done the ends were the same length and square to the reference surface.
That experience led me to check the sides, which were thankfully the same length, but when I checked them for square I found evidence of run out from the chop saw... More hand planing of the end grain took care of that fairly quickly. I'm now ready to mark and cut the dovetails next time I'm in the shop. I'll decide when I get here whether to cut pins or tails first. Right now I'm leaning toward the tails.
I checked the lengths of all the side pieces and discovered that somehow the ends for both boxes were off by about 1/8". I suppose I could have swapped them to use the longer ones together and the shorter ones together, but I had already matched the pieces for good grain and color so I decided to modify the lengths until they matched.
Initially I clamped the parts for each box together and hand planed until they were
the same length. Then I realized I had managed to plane them out of square (more on how I did that in a minute), and had to go back to correct that. If you've never done this with a hand plane, there are a couple of tricks that help.
First, make sure that the blade is properly set for parallel. Hopefully your plane has an adjustment lever for this, like mine does, but if not you will have to do this some other way. This was the source of my problem: I have been experimenting with a looser lever cap so that adjustment of the blade is easier and more accurate. Well, it turns out I had made the lever cap too loose and my fingers were moving the blade by gripping it while I planed. Tightening the screw that secures the lever cap by about 1/8 of a turn fixed that problem. I had no more unexplained deviation...
Second, when correcting a problem like I had, start on the high side of the surface and plane progressively across it. By placing the plane mostly off the board edge I was able to re-establish a (very small) square surface and work it across the width of the board until the full piece was square. This is much easier than it sounds,
and when I was done the ends were the same length and square to the reference surface.
That experience led me to check the sides, which were thankfully the same length, but when I checked them for square I found evidence of run out from the chop saw... More hand planing of the end grain took care of that fairly quickly. I'm now ready to mark and cut the dovetails next time I'm in the shop. I'll decide when I get here whether to cut pins or tails first. Right now I'm leaning toward the tails.
Labels: Projects, Techniques
posted by rookster at
10:04 PM
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