http://www.woodreview.com.au 69TECHNIQUEThe final step is to smooth and dress the surface with a
finely-set smoothing plane (photo 7).
Straighten and square the face edge
Choose which edge you will use as your face or reference
edge. This edge needs to perfectly straight along its length
and perfectly square to your face side. Load the board into
your front vice. Longer boards should be further supported
on a sliding deadman. Use a straightedge to identify any
high spots along the length and boldly mark these with
a timber crayon. Take a longer plane, such as a No.6 or
longer and begin by taking targeted spot strokes at the
high spots.
Now start to take full length shavings (photo 8). As you
progress, use a straightedge to check the straightness of
your work. You can see in (photo 9) that I’m using the
edge of the sole of my No.6 plane for this task.
Once you are taking full-length shavings, start to check for
squareness. This should be done at several locations along
the length of the board (photo 1 0 ). Mark any high spots
where you need to focus the cut on the next pass to correct
any issues. Continue taking passes until you can take a
full-length, full-width shaving and the resulting surface is
straight and square.
Dressing the opposite surfaces
Once you have a face side and edge, you have two
primary options from here. If you have the appropriate
equipment, you can now reference your face side on the
tablesaw fence to rip your board to width and run the
board through the thicknesser to dress the opposite face.
This is how I processed my boards in my small workshop
in the USA.
To fully complete the process by hand, you now need to
take the skills that I’ve already described in the preceding
paragraphs to dress the two opposite surfaces. To ensure
you end up with a dressed board that is perfectly flat,
straight and square all round, as well as being the desired
dimensions, you’ll also need to reference off your face side
and edge.
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