Fundamentals of Hand Tools Session 2: Thicknessing and Joinery

When you plane your wood, the ultimate goal is to get a perfect fit between the sides of the box and the dado we'll be making later. This has to fit just so to make a good glue joint. There are two ways to get there. You can either use a power planer and keep on planing until you get that perfect fit, or go the route that I'm about to show you which uses a hand plane to get wood down to a specific thickness. It's not all that hard, actually. To do that, I've made a test block that has two grooves in it. The first groove here is a little bit too thick, 0.02 of an inch too thick. So when I run my wood through the planer, the power planer that is, I want to keep on going until it fits just perfectly into this fat groove. Then I've made a second groove using my dado set, set at exactly 1/2 inch. And now what I'm going to do is to plane this piece, which is one of the front and back pieces, and also the side pieces, because they are all the same size, until it exactly fits in this groove. Let me show you how to do that. To plane the wood, I'm going to be using a very simple jig to hold the board, because as you know, it's probably, it is very hard to hold a thin piece of wood like this and short piece of wood like this on a workbench. But this simple device will do the trick, no problem at all. It's just a piece of MDF with two pieces of 1/4-inch plywood nailed down to it, that's it. And what holds the wood in place, I'm going to butt it right up here, are two opposing wedges, the same angle cut on them. And if I just stick the wedges against each other like this, give everything a little wiggle, tighten the wedges again, we're locked in solid. So now I can go ahead and plane the board without shifting or moving any which way at all. Now, you remember the goal here is to plane this until it fits exactly in this piece. Well, taking it out of here and trying it over and over again would be a pain. So instead I've got two scrap pieces that are the exact thickness, they fit in here just right. They're from some boxes I made a few weeks ago. And I'm going to place them on either side of the piece I've got right here. So to start off planing, I'm just going to make the first side perfectly smooth. Then I'm going to flip it over and keep planing until it's exactly the right thickness. Now to set up my plane, I've adjusted it until it takes a very, very thin shaving because I don't want to remove very much wood. My goal is to make a surface that's ultra-smooth, which will look the best under an oil finish, better than a sanded surface, and certainly better than one that just comes out of the planer. So let's just start planing, shall we? When I'm done with one side, just pull the wedges right out, flip the piece end for end, stick the wedges back in there. Put my test pieces on either side. And keep planing until I feel that the two pieces are exactly even. I've built some efficiencies into building this box. All four blanks that you made, the one for the top, the one for the two sides, and the ones for the front and back are all the same length. So they all fit in this jig. And it's a good idea to do this operation on all of them so you get a totally smooth surface. Now, setting aside the top blank for a bit, that exact thickness doesn't matter, think about the box itself. The exact thickness of the front and the back pieces isn't all that important. So I usually start planing those first. And if you overshoot a little bit and you plane them too thin, that's fine. Just set them aside, you can keep on going. Then, work on the blank that has the two end pieces on it. And when you plane that, keep going until it's just so and if you overshoot that, well, okay. Just back up a little bit, make another piece, maybe you've done that to begin with. You'll be okay. Now let me show you some tips about planing, though. I've sent by plane up to cut a very thin shaving. When I push it, I'm going to put all my first pressure downward right here and just push on the back end. When I get about here, I'm going to have equal pressure on both hands. When I get to the end of the stroke, there's no pressure with the front hand, just forward pressure with the back hand. I'm also going to skew the plane a bit, which effectively lowers the cutting angle of the blade without actually changing the actual angle of the blade, making the plane easier to push. And I'm going to walk my way across the board, making overlapping strokes from front to back so I'm sure that I'm covering the entire surface. Okay, when I'm done planing, we can take the board out of here and then we can move on to cutting the dados in the sides. In this next step, we're going to cut dados in the front and back pieces to receive the sides. I've set up a dado blade in my saw that's exactly 1/2 inch thick and raised it up until it will cut a dado that's 1/4 inch deep. Now, to push the stock through the wood, I'm not going to try and just hit a pencil mark on the wood. I've set up a fence and a stop block clamped securely to it, make sure the handle doesn't get in the path of the blade, so that the dado will be cut exactly in the right place. So let's turn the saw on and make our first dado. Do that to both pieces and we're ready to move on. In this next step, we're going to cut a groove all the way through the blank that I'll cut later into two end pieces. It's a lot safer and easier to cut the groove in this piece while it's still this length, rather than cut it first into two short pieces and cut grooves in them. So I've changed the dado set. So it's now only 1/4 inch wide rather than 1/2 inch wide. Left the height exactly the same so it'll cut a groove 1/4 inch into the wood. And set the fence the correct distance from the blade so that the groove has about 1/4 of an inch in height. So just make sure that the piece sits tight against the fence, turn the saw on and we'll get going. After I'm done cutting the groove, it's a good idea to use the table saw again or a chop saw to cut two end pieces to the exact same length. This is pretty hard to do by hand. So using machine, no question about it. And then let's now move on to some more hand tool work.