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If you need to put a straight edge on a piece of wood, but don’t have a jointer - this method is for you!
Crafts and tradespeople have traditionally counted on either jointer planes or a powered jointer to put a true edge on crooked stock. Many shops are short on space, or there are budget constraints to prevent the addition of this tooling in the workshop. What do you do when you need a straight edge then?
In this episode, DirtFarmer Jay demonstrates a great method, using a ProClamp® straight edge guide. There are various brands of this product, and we found the ProClamp® to be a perfect combo of price, quality, features, and availability. We got ours from PeachTree WoodWorking Supply (https://www.ptreeusa.com/). It came well-packed, arrived quickly, and was in good condition.
While we’d like to take credit for this idea, that wouldn’t be honest. DirtFarmer Jay saw the tip in the January 2020 issue of WoodSmith® magazine, where a tipster, C.R. Davis, from Arkansas provided the idea. The method C.R. provided really works well!
The straight clamp is modified slightly by cutting off one side of the “slider” handle (called a “bowtie” by the ProClamp® folks). This is an easy change, using only a hacksaw. If you want to restore the tool to its original condition later, a replacement “bowtie” is $5 plus $2 shipping. No brainer.
To cut a straight edge, the clamp is positioned on top of the piece of the wood, with an edge of the clamp hanging over the edge of the piece of wood. With one side of the “bowtie” cut away, the straight edge can sit against the table saw fence. The fence is then positioned so that the opposite edge (the one that does not have the straight edge clamped to it) is run through the saw blade, producing a true edge. The clamp is then removed, the stock rolled over, and the fence adjusted so that a straight edge is cut that is parallel to the first one. Cool, huh?
In the spirit of full disclosure, this approach does not work well for twisted or significantly cupped stock. Nor can you use this way for stock longer than the clamp’s capacity. Lastly, this is good only for “squaring up” only one edge and is good for stock that is otherwise flat or can be treated with a thickness planer or sander.
The MAJOR advantage of having a jointer is that it allows you to flatten the face of the lumber, then ride that face against the jointer fence while an adjacent edge is straightened. This gives the stock a flat face and straight edge that are perpendicular to each other. The stock can then be run through a thickness planer to flatten that other face. Finally, the piece is run through the table saw to cut another true edge parallel to the one produced on the jointer.
While the method we featured only trues up one edge on the stock that is already essentially flat, there is one BIG advantage to this approach (besides space and cash savings!) over most shop level jointers: NO TEAR OUT.
When grain direction changes in a piece of wood and that wood encounters jointer blades going “against the grain”, there are going to be chip outs, which is called “tear out.” With a sawblade cutting off the edge, grain direction makes no difference, as the wood fibers are cleanly severed as the blade passes through the wood. Something to keep in mind!
With the clamp guide retrofit method we’ve used, you can throw ingenuity at the problem, using tooling that you already have, or is inexpensive to acquire, and you can JUST DO IT YOURSELF!
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Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
Do you need to put a straight edge on a piece of lumber,
but you don't have a joiner?
Well, stay tuned and I'll show you a way to do it on the table saw
that works every single time.
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
One of the common tasks in any maker shop is putting a straight edge
on a piece of lumber or on a piece of material.
And usually the tool of choice for that kind of task is a joiner.
But what if you don't have the budget or the space
and you don't want to invest in that, but you do have a table saw?
Well, let me show you a technique that came to me
actually through WoodSmith Magazine, one of the tip sections in there.
And I'm happy to pass it on to you.
So let's take a look here.
Here's a task here that what I'm going to do.
This is one of those clamping straight edges.
This one happens to be made by ProGrip.
I bought this from Peachtree Woodworking.
And this is a 50 inch straight edge clamp
meant to go ahead and lock over the edge of four foot
pieces of sheet good plywood and that sort of thing.
This is the imperial version for our international friends.
You can see that is in inches.
And I believe they do have a metric version that's in centimeters as well.
Be that as may, this device is meant to clamp on to
to a wide piece of material.
So in this case here, I could clamp this right on to the edge of this.
By pushing down on this lever here.
And now it is a fix to this piece of sheet good.
Now, in a future video, I'll show you some of the other details
of some of the accessories of using this.
But for this video today, I'm going to show you a modification
that allows you to use this to straight edge a piece of lumber.
Well, let's walk through the basic steps of what you're going to do.
We have this straight edge, which has this nice straight reference edge.
We have this stock that we desire to get a straight edge on.
And what we're going to do is create a straight edge on one side
and then flip it over and run it through the saw again.
And that way you have two parallel straight edges
and you've straightened the piece of lumber.
All right.
What we'll do, though, to create a straight edge is we're going to put this clamp
on the stock and we're going to overhang it just a bit
so that this would encounter the saw fence first on the table saw.
And so I need to adjust this in.
This is called the bow tie.
I'm going to bring it here and clamp it.
And then when I do that, notice now I've created a new straight edge on the edge.
Do you see the same problem I do?
Well, here's the issue.
This slider part right here is overhanging
and therefore would collide on the side of the table saw.
That has to be removed.
Now, fortunately, let me show you how this is made.
So you'll understand that I'm not damaging the clamp.
Now, you need to make sure that you're taking off the correct edge.
It's when you flip it, it's backwards.
So we're actually taking off this edge.
This is called the bow tie in this particular product.
And it is just simply grass to move this back and forth.
These are little grabber plates right there.
And by grabbing the bow tie, you can rough adjust it,
put it up against whatever you're going to clamp and then clamp it.
But notice that this if I cut one of these off, it doesn't stop it from working.
It just doesn't give me a place to grab like that.
So I'll end up probably grabbing it like this to move.
So we're going to have to cut that off right there
so that this is not overhanging the edge.
All right, let's go ahead and do that.
To make sure that I cut off the correct tab while it's installed on the stock,
I just go ahead and put a mark on the side that needs to come off.
All right. Now we've taken this clamp.
We've affixed the table with these type of clamps upside down.
The bow tie is sticking out.
You can see our mark of what side needs to be cut off.
And now I've protected it with a bit of tape here.
So I don't end up damaging this nice piece of equipment.
Let's go ahead and use a hacksaw and cut that off right there.
All right. Let's just dress this up a little bit here just to kind of smooth it.
So we're going to go ahead and round that off.
We're going to do it. Let's do it nice.
And there we go. All right.
Now, this little piece right here, if I ever want to return it back,
I was able to buy this from the manufacturer for five dollars
for the piece, plus two dollars shipping. Pretty cheap.
I suspect I'll keep it this way, though, because I can operate it
just fine without one end of the bow tie.
All right. Let's go to work with this.
We're going to use it now to straight edge a piece of lumber. OK.
So again, just to review what we're doing here
is we are actually creating a straight edge.
It's going to ride against the fence.
The side that's going to be trimmed flat is on the outboard side.
Then we'll flip the piece of wood and we'll trim off the other side
and you'll end up with two perfect parallel straight edges.
Now, before we proceed any further, I want to point out one thing very quickly,
how there's a difference between how the joiner works
and how the table saw works and producing a straight edge.
For those of you who use a joiner, you're aware that there's a set of cutters in it.
Most joiners have three knives and they are essentially coming through
and cutting at a fast speed as lumber is passed over it.
Well, it's very efficient.
It's a chopping action, a shearing action.
Some of the better joiners have lots of little cutters,
but you're shearing wood off to get that edge.
One of the problems is if there's a grain change
and you have grain coming this way, when a cutter encounters it,
you'll tend to have what's called tear out. It's ugly.
The difference here is that we're actually shaving off the wood
with a rotary cutter, the saw blade itself,
which is shearing off the edge and eliminating.
It doesn't care which way the grain is going.
You're just going to shear it all off.
So that's one advantage.
One downside of this, this technique is only good
for putting an edge, a straight edge on.
It does not take care of doing face joining like a full joiner will.
All right.
Let's go ahead and fix the clamp to the piece of wood to be straight edged.
I'm going to hang it over the edge just slightly here.
Let's bring the clamp end in.
And I'm just going to take this down to first position
so it's not hanging too low.
Now I have my reference straight edge that can run along the table saw fence.
And I'm going to estimate the width here for our purposes today.
I'm going to say it's going to be cutting off about that much right there.
So I'm going to bring the table saw.
There we go. Let's just do it right in this area here.
About like that.
I'll go ahead and set the table saw and I'm going to raise the blade
tall enough to trim off everything at the same time.
And there we go.
I can just use that till it encounters the straight edge
and then raise it slightly more.
All right.
We're now ready to run this through and to true up this edge.
So let's do that.
All right.
So here are the actual results you can see there.
Let's go ahead and take the clamp off.
And now you have a piece of wood
that has a very nice, straight, long edge, very square to the edge.
What you would do next now is flip this over 180.
Put this back against the fence.
Notice now you have this very nice straight edge.
Move the fence over so it's just trimming
and you're going to end up with a nice piece of parallel stock.
And if you're doing this kind of lumber where it's got the rounded mill edges.
Notice now you remove those and you have some really nice straight edges
that you can use for different shop projects and so forth.
Well, like I said, if you found this to be helpful, won't you like the video?
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Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay at DirtFarmerJay.com.
