The Shooting Board - Must Have Shop Jig.

Today, we're gonna make a very simple shooting board. Now, this is a very complicated one that I made that has a magnetic saw guide and everything like that, but you don't need to make this. If you want to, there's a link here in the corner. Today, I'm gonna show you how to make a quick and easy one, sort of like the crosscut sled we made last week. This is the manual version of a crosscut sled. But first, I was watching a little YouTube this weekend and I saw this clip. Wait until I had an extra set of hands in the shop to get it done. Now, Chris Salamone and Sean Boyd are not experts. I am actually the tape ball champion. Sean is just my protege and Chris is still playing in the minor league. So, let me show you how this is done. All right, I just measured Sean's shot and all I gotta say is, this is what 30 yards really looks like. All right, Sean and Chris, new record. 30 yards at 90 feet. All right, you can tell by how sweaty I am that only took one try. Get in. Oh. Ah. Bring, bring. And if you don't know Sean and Chris, which I'm sure you do, their channels are linked below. Go check them out, because they're sure to retort very soon. So, let's get into what a shooting board is for. Okay, a shooting board has three basic components. It has a bench hook, like this one here. And I just use this one to lock into my Moxon vise. And then it has a fence. And that is some degrees from your shoulder here, which is where your shooting plane goes. And normally that's about 90 degrees or 45 degrees. And the way it works is, you take a board, and I'm gonna release some videos coming up on how to saw correctly. And one of the reasons that a hand tool woodworker uses a shooting plane, is to get things perfect. Now, when you saw a line, typically what you wanna do is be slightly away from your line. Because unless you're somebody crazy, like Rob Cosman or Matt Eslia, you're probably not gonna be right on that line. And then you go to your shooting board, which you know has a 90 degree fence. And you're gonna use your shooting plane to bring that line into square. And what the fence does, is it's like a backer board, like we talked about in that tear out video. It keeps you from getting tear out in the back. And when you're done, you should have a perfectly square board. And that's how you get down to your line. So let me show you how to make a simple version of one of these. Now a shooting board is gonna have three basic components. And that's gonna be the body, which I'm gonna use this scrap piece of half inch MDF. The shoulder I'm gonna use, this is an eighth inch thick piece of plywood. And then a fence. And I'm gonna use this cherry for our fence. A fence should be removable, so that you can re-square it up. You shouldn't glue down your fence. So we're gonna cut a quarter inch groove in our body and our fence. And then we're gonna put in a piece of hardwood in there, so that the fence can be removed. And that way if we need to, we can re-square up the fence. So let's trim these up. Now a shooting board doesn't have to be super wide, because you're cross cutting when you're using a shooting board. So what matters is sort of this length. So I'm gonna cut this to about 12 inches. We'll cut our shoulder to about 16 inches. And that'll give us something for our plane to ride on. And then we'll mill up our fence. And our fence should be about as tall as the thickest material that you would use on a shooting board. So let's get into cutting these up. Okay, so now what we wanna do is cut a groove in both our fence piece and our body. Now this needs to be square to this shoulder piece here, because that's where your hand plane's gonna ride. So I'm gonna do that on a cross cut sled. And then I need a matching groove in our fence. And I'm gonna do that along my table saw fence. And you want it to be the exact same size. Depth doesn't really matter, because you're gonna cut a runner that fits in here. And that's just gonna stick up. And you want that to be pretty tight when you put it in, because you don't want any play in your fence. What I do is I cut it really tight. I kind of tap it in there with a hammer. And then I'll bevel the top edges. That way my fence sort of gets on there and I can kind of tap it in. And that way your fence gets secured in place and creates that zero clearance for the piece that you are cross cutting with your hand plane. So let's go ahead and put, I'm doing a half inch dado stack. You can do a router bit as long as you get it square. So let's go ahead and give these a cut. Okay, now we're gonna go ahead and put this thing together. The order that this is going to go in is we're going to put our shoulder on there first. And one thing I learned on past shooting boards is don't cut your shoulder too short this way. It doesn't really matter how long it is. But if it's too short, when you sometimes come to the front of your cut, it tips your shooting board up. So we're gonna put that on first. I'm just gonna glue it and probably add just a couple screws just so I don't have to use clamps. And then we're gonna put on our bench hook. Now, there's two ways you can put this bench hook on. You could put it on the bottom here or on the back like this. I don't know that either way would be stronger or weaker than the other, but I like to have a little bit more reference area on my bench hook. So I'm gonna put it on the bottom. Then from there, we're going to glue in our little key here and make sure that that's fitting nice and tight for you. And you wanna try and minimize squeeze out on this. And if you did it right, this should be so tight that you almost don't really need glue. So I'm just gonna use a little super glue, a little 2P10 in there with a couple drops of wood glue. So that way I can just keep working on this. And then once we get it together, we'll give it a quick sanding, clean everything up, and then I'm gonna show you how to use it. So let's get this put together. Okay, quick little mistake I just made. So I probably should have used not MDF for this bench hook. As you can see this split right here, but in the honor of showing how we fix our mistakes, what I'm gonna do is just take a little glue, put that in that crack. And my other two screws are fine. They didn't split. And granted, I can always replace this bench hook. It has no function other than to keep it from moving around. So it doesn't matter whether it's working or not. So then what I'm gonna do is just back my screw out, throw a clamp on this. And you can see that gets that crack gone. Then I'm gonna put my screw back in and leave that clamp on for a little while and just let it set up. And there we go. That should be just fine. So we're gonna let that set up while we put together the rest of our shooting board. Okay, so here's one of the coolest things. When you know your hand plane is sharp, and usually for end grain, I like to use a low angle, a low angle jack or block plane even. But look at this. These look like shavings, but they turn to powder. I mean, that's just so cool. So this came out great. One of the things to know is if you are not getting square boards, it could mean that your fence is out of square and you can just check that by going off your reference edge and seeing that your square touches it all the way across. If it's not, that can very easily be fixed by remilling your piece. You still have your groove, so it doesn't matter. Or you can use a hand plane to square it up by taking it off and running it up against this piece or putting it in a vise. So that's one way to fix it. And the cool thing is if wood moves over time, you know, that's the reason we use plywood and MDF for the body. That way that stays really flat. But if your fence moves over time, you can either make a new one really easily or re-square it up really easily. One thing you saw me do is put a heavy chamfer on this. That just makes putting your fence down a lot easier and makes it easier to adjust. This is just such a valuable tool. And this finish you saw me use, this stuff's really cool. It's something I made for cutting boards and it looks so good. And it dries nice, protective, hard coating for something like this that's gonna be having moving parts. It's just beeswax and mineral oil. I think it was one to four, four parts mineral oil to one parts beeswax. And you just heat it up till it all melts. And then it goes into this nice cool like gel when you're done. And it works great for this kind of stuff. So we're gonna use this for one of our next videos, which is gonna be a video on how to saw correctly. We're gonna be using some Japanese saws. I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks for getting really good cuts and then getting them absolutely dialed in with a shooting board and with a hand plane. So guys, thanks for watching. If you're new here, please subscribe. Best way to support the channel is head over to the Katzmoses store and pick up one of our awesome products or t-shirts. Thanks for watching guys. Stay safe in the shop. We'll see you soon.