Saturday, August 14, 2010

Scrap Shooting Board

The recent issue of Fine Woodworking magazine had a great article on different bench hooks and the use of a shooting board.  Now, I've had building a shooting board on my list since lists were invented, or at least since my waaay backordered Lie-Nielsen miter iron plane arrived.  As you can see in this picture, it's helping me out.

The week when I decided this, my car was in the shop for a new transmission (read: lots of tool money).  That said, I had no way to go buy wood for this so I hit the scrap bin.  This photo is a mockup of what I was gonna make.  The main board was oak-banded 12mm oak ply leftover from a patio cabinet, the front banding is sapelé ogee molding from a built-in dresser, the plane's "track" left over home-sawn sapelé veneer, the fence board a walnut off cut from I don't know where.  It all sits on a birch ply substrate, origins unknown.

The fence board wasn't thick enough so I found two more sapelé off cuts and decided that looks gauche to glue them up thick, so I sliced some walnut from that scrape to put between them.

I also glued the banded oak working surface to the substrate so I could get on with banding and putting the plane's track.

Banded the widest side of the shooting board with the sapelé veneer (here flush trimming it off with a hand saw... yeah, I know, you can't make that out so it didn't happen...)  You can see that at this point, I had the molding on the front, plane track in sapelé down, and a scrap of walnut from my flooring inlay on the narrow side.

Here's the unfinished board ready for several coats of Seal-A-Cell.  The bench hook has a piece of transition molding I made for that floor with a multi-bead profile.

...and after the Seal-A-Cell!  Bling, baby!

The knurled brass knobs are for aligning the fence and are not installed here... you didn't think I'd put a plastic star knob on it, did you?  It's my garage; got standards to maintain... :)

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