Every now and then, someone newer to handplaning mentions having had some difficulty jointing and edge square. Plenty of solutions have been offered, and once more just occurred to me.

Usually, I just eyeball it, and get pretty good, and can usually tune out any un-square with a slightly cambered iron in my jointer plane, or adjusting the angle of the blade.

A jointer fence would be nice, but I don't have one.

Anyway, today, I was having a bad day, I guess, and after cleaning up some rough lumber for my bench, I was pretty far off of square, farthest I'd been in a while! This was the solution I quickly came up with - I don't claim this is astounding or new or I came up with anything no one else has thought of a thousand other times, but after I did it, I was like, "why has this never occurred to me!" It worked particularly well with this board which was probably around 6/4 - I don't think this is suited to narrower boards, but those are easier for me to bring back into square.

Anyway . .
jointing.png

1: Well, my board is nice and straight from end to end, but damn if I didn't screw up getting it square to the face!

2: But my heavily cambered jack plane is on the bench from working the faces of the board - so I grabbed that and made a few passes, keeping the thing centered on the board the whole way down. After a pass, maybe two, it had bottomed out, leaving a bit of a hollow. The square is making contact on one corner.

3: With my jointer set pretty lightly, I cut off the "corner" on one side until the square rests even on two points. I did have to make a second pass with the jack plane.

With the square going across and contacting on two points, the jointer has a nice surface to ride on, and I can finish squaring it up making full length passes until I get a full width shaving.


The other thing I discovered prepping wood today? Well - dragging the plane backwards across the wood while scrubbing the surface really does seem to affect the blade life compared to just slightly lifting the plane between strokes.