By Joshua Farnsworth
In the above video, and in the below 10 steps, I teach one of the most basic and essential skills in traditional woodworking: how to square, flatten, & dimension your own rough lumber into finished boards.
To build quality traditional furniture, you need to start with perfectly flat and square lumber. Some people achieve this with power jointers, planers, and table saws. While the electrical power route is more economical for a commercial woodworking workshop, I prefer the safety, exercise, quiet, and historical feeling that comes from dimensioning my boards by hand. Plus, it just makes you feel cool.
Sure it takes a little longer, but why did you get into woodworking in the first place? To hurry and build a bunch of stuff, or to enjoy yourself? It’s therapeutic to take some things slowly. And with practice, squaring lumber by hand won’t take all that long…ask your ancestors.
TOOLS THAT YOU’LL NEED
Even though I have a nice tool buying guide (here), I’m still often asked for links to the tools that I use in my videos, so here they are (note that you don’t need all these tools):
WORKBENCH:
HAND PLANES:
- You won’t need all of these, just a jack plane, smoothing plane, jointer plane, & block plane. I just wanted to share some options:
HAND SAWS:
- Vintage Disston No. 16 Cross Cut Panel Saw
- Vintage Disston No. D-8 Rip Panel Saw
- Vintage Millers Falls Miter box and miter saw
MARKING & MEASURING:
- Starrett 6-inch combination square
- Vintage metal try square
- Veritas Wheel Marking Gauge
- Lie-Nielsen panel gauge
- Wooden Straight Edge (see my tutorial)
- Staedtler Mars 780 Technical Mechanical Pencil
- Winding sticks (don’t buy…make your own)
STEP 1: CUT THE BOARD TO ROUGH DIMENSIONS
Use a longer try square (12″ +) to mark your rough board’s approximate length.
Then use a Cross Cut panel saw to cut your rough board to rough length (across the grain). Keep in mind that this isn’t your final length. You’re just removing any messy wood, and getting to a manageable length; somewhat close to what you’ll eventually arrive at.
You can also use a Rip Panel saw to rip the board lengthwise (along the grain) to get a manageable width, if needed. Here’s an old chart that shows the difference between Cross-cut saw teeth and Rip saw teeth:
STEP 2: FLATTEN A REFERENCE FACE WITH HANDPLANES
Place the board between the bench dogs with the arced side facing up, to avoid rocking. You may need to use shims if your board is in really bad shape. Use a scrub plane or a jack plane with a cambered iron (8 degree camber/arc). This plane is going to be doing rough work, so don’t worry about tuning it extensively.
If you have an extreme arc in the board, plane down the length of the board, removing the high center:
Before planning across the grain, bevel the edge that is farthest away from you, to prevent major tear out:
Then plane across the grain, from one end to the other.
Adjust your plane so that your shavings are as big as possible, while still being able to move the plane.
You can also take some diagonal passes both ways, to aid with flattening:
Tilt your jack plane on its edge and drag it along the board to get a rough idea of your progress toward flatness:
The main reason I’m posting is because I’d like to enter the Damstom D300 giveaway. The clamps look fantastic. That said, I’ve been reading the articles on this blog for quite a while and I always find them very interesting. This article is especially helpful. While I work with both hand and power tools, knowing the basics helps with overall woodworking technique. As far as the prizes for the giveaway, I’m looking forward to winning the clamps. If I’m not… Read more »
This site is amazing. There is so much terrific information! This is one of my favorite and “go to” videos. I love to reference it before I grab my hand planes. Those clamps in the give away look great and I would be rheilled to get them. If I do not win those, I would like the Shaker Candle Stand video. The shirts all look great but i really like the red or brown hand plane shirts. My size is… Read more »
This site is excellent. I had no idea that it existed. I’m going to pour through all of these forums as I am sure that I will be able to glean much! Great idea, Joshua – having a giveaway to bring woodworkers to this site. Kudos!
Glad you found my site Odee! How did you find it?
I have a 2x8x12 plank of wood that is splintered and looks like it’s been through the ringer a few times. Lots of water damage, but it looks beautiful. I want to make a planter box out of it, but it needs to be planed. What is your recommendation?
It couldn’t hurt to use a hand plane to plane it down and see how it looks!
If you need 1/2 or 1/4 inch thick boards for a project, where do you get them from? I find a lot of evidence that people are resawing with a bandsaw, a few who resaw by hand, some people buy wood cut to thickness. In this article you had wood that could be planed to thickness – what if it had needed to be half this thickness. How do you dimension thickness??
I personally resaw using a bandsaw, but this is how the real studs did it in the olden days! https://woodandshop.com/colonial-williamsburg-hay-cabinet-shop-tutorial-resaw-wide-boards/
Joshua, Thanks. I am just getting started with woodworking. I noticed that most of the sources are selling rough stock at 4/4 or larger, but project demos seldom talk about getting it dimensioned to thickness.
Your site is an amazing resource; I just discovered it while hunting for compass/divider advice.
Thanks for such great detailed articles
Hey Chris,
Glad you found me! Yeah, my hand tool buyer’s guides will help you out a bunch: https://woodandshop.com/which-hand-tools-do-you-need-for-traditional-woodworking/
And for smaller boards, you could always use a hand saw to rip it to a more narrow thickness, but it’s a lot of work! Hope to see you asking questions on the forum!
Best,
Joshua
Hi Joshua,
I found your post about hand planing enormously helpful as research for a story I am writing about a 17th century French boy who’s truing up warped boards for a primitive fort. I wonder if you would be so kind as to share with me any sort of accidents or injuries that might occur to someone undertaking this task. Thank you for your consideration.
Dana
Glad it was helpful Dana! That’s neat about your story. I guess there are plenty of minor injuries that could occur, though not to the extent as using power tools. French workers used forged holdfasts, so maybe the boy accidently trapped his hand under a hold fast or hit it with a mallet? Or cut his fingers with a hand saw? :)
Really, 17th century, building a fort. Tough it up.
You build a house today, and you hit your finger with a hammer, are you going to lay down and die?
Seriously, suck it up.
Thanks for the great post and forgive my poor English, I can successfully make the reference face and reference edge now, but from step 7 on, I can not plane it to match the gauge lines all the way across, I get into the situation that somewhere is cut into the line and other place still needed to remove more materials, such like one end is cut into line, the other end is still far above the line, any suggestion… Read more »
I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand what you’re asking. Please rephrase.
Thanks for your reply, What I means when I have a refrence face, I can not get the opposite face parallel with it, even I have the gauge lines marked here, I always got this face messed up, It’s flat, but it’s not parallet to the refrence face, So I waste too much time on fix it.
In my video & article I show how you use a marking gauge to mark the correct thickness around the board. Then as long as you plane down to those marks, your board will be the same thickness all around.