MATERIAL
PREP

Are you looking for a way to instantly increase the perceived value of your boxes and cabinets? This tutorial will show you how. (Hint: It’s not as simple as polishing them)

The boards you purchase from the wood store are often not wide enough for certain projects. This means you will need to edge joint boards in order to make up the correct width, and there is an essential technique to give you long lasting glue joint.

Planing one face flat is the first step to preparing a piece of wood to be straight, square and parallel. It’s important to get this initial face accurate as all three remaining faces are referenced from the first face. Get it wrong, and it’s going to take a very long time to fix!

After establishing one initial face, we need to plane an edge square to it. This can be challenging depending on the length and thickness of the board but there are a few small tricks to help you along the way. It’s also a very transferable skill.

When planing boards, you may encounter whats knows as ‘reversing grain’. This causes tear out and is quite possibly one of the most frustrating things in woodworking. But there are a few easy ways to reduce or eliminate it from happening completely!

After flattening, thicknessing, and jointing has been complete it’s time to move onto the final stage of dimensioning material, endgrain. This stuff is hard as nails and required very sharp and well tuned tools. This is how to plane the stuff.

You now have a face side and a face edge that are perfectly flat and square to one another. Now comes the time to hog off some material and make the two faces parallel to one another. This requires a lot of elbow grease so get warming up!