shooting board v0

Almost immediately when you start trying to put two pieces of wood together, you realize how difficult it is to make things "square" - which is to say, straight. (These terms are so loaded, you have to laugh.)

A friend recommended that one of the first jigs I make be a shooting board - a way to square the ends of boards so they can be joined together. If you aren't using an electric jointer, this is a nominally simple way of squaring things up. So following KM Tools' plans, I set out trying to make a thing.

The fundamental utility of the shooting board is that you can have three straight materials to reference off of - the "shoulder" and the "fence." If either of these are not 90 degrees, you're going to end up having a pretty crap time. Like a lot of things in woodworking, if you don't have these basic utilities, it's hard to make them correctly! The final reference here is the your plane sole itself. You hold material against the fence, on its side you then "shoot" the plane up the shoulder to remove material until the work is square.

In retrospect I wish I had just bought a shooting board, though making a mediocre one was at least an educational experience. You learn things like - cutting plywood sucks, and purple heartwood is a pain in the ass. Also, this project is where my unhealthy obsession with using hard maple for everything started.

I don't actually have any pictures of this thing in use, because I hated using it so much. Maybe not fair to myself or the tool, but it was just a bit too janky to be useful.

Eventually I got tired of it and bought Veritas', along with their left handed shooting plane, which were both huge productivity and quality of life improvements.

Here it is, sitting on Saw Bench v0, when it was still in use, before being relegated to the scrap bin.