A straight and square board, surfaced on all four sides is a thing to behold. When it’s 7 feet long, 11 inches wide and 2 inches thick, it’s down right beautiful. And that’s what I did over the weekend. It may be poplar, but soon it will be a Roman Workbench.

Little thin for a proper Japenese bench,

Like any pretty board in my workshop, though, it started out ugly and rough. But ugly and rough is how we like ’em ’round here (at least at the start). Then comes the Jack Plane.

My only complaint about the new floor is that it’s slick sometimes.

In my experience, the trick to flattening a wide, thick board is to start on the cupped aide and not get too overzealous. It’s very easy to plane a hump if you’re not paying attention. And that’s no recipe for keeping as much thickness as possible.

This is not a how-to on traversing . So my only other advice is to figure out where the twist is early in the process. It’s no good first taking out the cup then having to take out the twist. That’s likewise a recipe for losing more thickness than necessary. Once I have one side flat, I like to send it through the thickness planer. Others square an edge right away. Either works.

Then I tackle the edges. The goal is to remove only as much width as necessary. I try to square each foot or so to the face, then worry about overall straightness. On this board, I ended up only losing about 1/8″. A testament to the sawyer more than my planing skills.

So glad to have my 5 1/2 back in the shop.

The end result (seen in the first picture above) is a board that’s ready for joinery. And joinery, in this case, means big, round, wedged tenons.

JPG