Larry Blanchard wrote:
Now you start planing. Your last sentence is what I question.
Since most planes have a blade that goes very near the edge, how
do you keep it from cutting into the plywood? I could see it if
the part that rode on the plywood had no blade in it, but I
don't see how that could be the case.
BTW, I use my jointer plane mostly for edge joining two boards
and for that I just clamp them together.

What you do to make the shooting board, or what I do anyway, is to
take a long peice of very stable ply and use it as the base of the
board. I then get a thin, 1/4" piece of luan ply and make a
straight line along the length, assuming the edge isn't straight
as it is. Lay the thin ply on the birch ply and slide it back
from the edge far enough for the lane to lie on its side with its
sole touching the edge of the thin ply and be supported entirely,
or more by the birch ply. Like this on an end view.

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Glue the two peices of wood together and clamp them flat. When
they're dry, take what ever plane you're going to be using as a
jointer and run it along the edge of the upper board as though you
were jointing a board sitting on the top. This will leave the
ower edeg of the upper board as it was, but will cut a recess into
the upper board as deep as the set of your plane blade. When you
want to joint a couplke of boards, clamps them stacked on top of
the upper board even with the unrecessed edge. Now when you use
your jointer, it will remove the wood up to the point where it
touches its sole on the unrecessed edge of the upper piece of
ply. Once it gets to that point it'll stop cutting. Hopefully
the boards will be jointed, but if there are still some hollows to
be cut out, just advance the two boards a squidge further and do
it again. The nice thing about this is that if the sole and blade
aren't exactly 90 degrees, the dicrepancy will make upo for its
when you put the two baoards together, they'll be complimentary
angles.

It's harder to explain than to do, so if that didn't make sense,
tell me what was murky and I'll try to make sense, no promises
though.

Dave in Fairfax
--
Dave Leader
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