Jointing Small Parts
George VondriskaDescription
Jointing, the process of cleaning up and straightening an edge, isn’t restricted to jointers. You can also do this with hand tools. Joining small pieces of wood can be a challenge. When you’re working with small pieces a block plane works great for jointing and chamfering edges.
The setup
When you’re thinking about using a hand plane on a piece of wood, you’re probably planning on clamping the wood in a vise and passing the plane over it. Let’s flip things around a little. Clamp the plane in a vise, and take the material to the tool. On small parts, this is a MUCH easier approach. Before securing the plane in the vise, do a test cut or two to make sure your depth of cut is correct on the plane. Once it’s in the vise, it’s nearly impossible to get to the adjustment knobs and levers.
Edge and corner treatments
Once you’ve got the plane secured in your vise you can use it in much the same way you’d use a jointer; simply pass your material over the sole of the plane. You can clean up an edge, chamfer the corners, even round the corners by pivoting through the passes. Give it a try. You’ll find this is an easy way to joint small parts.
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This is a cool little thing to do in your shop, a cool little thing to know about. Which is when you're needing to clean up small parts like this, for instance, get those saw marks off, or maybe introduce a chamfer onto edges. Sometimes, easiest way to do this is instead of planing your work, let's work your plane. Is that what this would be about? I'm gonna clamp my block plane in the vice. And then now I'm just gonna use that like a jointer, little bit of down pressure. Pass number one. Look at how much better those saw marks are already. One more. So, cleaned up the edge, or like I said, maybe you wanna get some chamfers on there. It's just cool, it's not rocket science, but it's just thinking out of the box a little bit, a little bit different way to use a hand plane instead of clamping the work in the vice and planing it, clamping the plane in the vice and working it. Is that how that works? I dunno. But it's cool. That's it, just a simple little tip, getting you to use your tools maybe just a little bit differently.
Thanks for sharing with us, sometimes I forget to use these little routens.
One thing to be careful love, is with a small work piece, your hand is more exposed to the blade with this method. (Correction)
One thing to be careful of is with a small world peace if you slip your hand is very much more exposed to the blade with this method.