The usual choice for that task is wood veneer edge tape with a pre-applied adhesive backing. When the veneer species of the tape matches the face veneer of the plywood well, it’s thin enough to hide the edge plys without also looking “applied,” and it makes for a convincing bluff . But the thinness of the veneer and the limited strength of the adhesive often causes the veneer to eventually peel off on its own or become easily damaged through normal wear and tear of the exposed edge. The other option is to glue thicker 1/8″ or 1/4″ strips of solid wood, often called banding, to the plywood edge instead. This adds more abrasion resistance and durability, but the wood must be glued and clamped carefully so it aligns with the faces of the plywood. Or it can be applied overly wide, then trimmed flush afterward. The success of edge banding depends on careful clamping. Any gaps between the plywood and the banding looks amateurish and slapdash.

Edge V-groove bits, such as those shown here from Rockler, can give you a leg up on both of the other edge-covering options. The “convex” bit cuts a V-shaped recess into the edge of the plywood that intersects with the top and bottom face veneers of the sheet.

A mating “concave” bit reshapes the edge of solid lumber into a protruding beveled point that fits into the plywood recess.

Alternately, you could use the convex bit to mill a recess into the solid lumber and the concave bit to reshape the plywood into the beveled point, as shown in the inset photo example, above. This is a less common approach.

V-Groove Advantages

This routed intersection of plywood and solid wood has a number of advantages. For one, the recess and beveled point are self-aligning. Unlike conventional shop-made edge banding, which must be clamped at close intervals along the joint to ensure that the banding stays on track, solid-wood connections made with these bits require far fewer clamps. The banding has no way to slip out of registration with the plywood — it needs only to be pressed into place.

Another benefit to the “V” configuration is that it contributes more surface area for glue. Plywood typically consists of built-up layers of thick veneer laid crossways. So, on any given edge of a sheet, the pattern will be long/edge grain for one layer, short/end grain the next. The end grain layers can soak up a lot of glue. So, the more surface area the edge joint provides, the stronger the connection of the banding to the core material will be. A V-shaped edge offers a larger gluing area than a flat edge will.

A third asset of this router bit solution is that you have a number of options for how the final edge treatment looks. If you study the three banding options shown in the opening photo, the top example illustrates the solid-wood edge trimmed flush to the face veneers. If you were unable to see the joint from the side, it would be hard to tell that the plywood isn’t actually solid lumber; the banding need not add any protrusion past the plywood’s top and bottom faces if you don’t want it to.

The center example in the opening photo shows the solid-wood edging trimmed to within 1/4″ of the plywood. This way, it looks similar to the effect of applying 1/4″ edge banding to the plywood but with the added benefit of a much thicker core and the self-aligning V-groove.

Or, perhaps you want to have the edging of a plywood shelf make a bolder statement. Easily done: just choose a wood species that contrasts with the plywood veneer for a more dramatic effect, and make the edge banding from that instead. The wider and stronger the color or pattern, the more the custom edging will call attention to itself.

Router Table Use

Many router bits can be used safely either in a handheld router or in a router table. However, these edge V-groove bits require their pilot bearings registered in line with a fence or allowed to follow the edge of a template.

If you’re using the bit set to create banding for flat shelving, install them in a router table equipped with a fence and a mid- to full-size router. The edges/ends of a plywood shelf will have plenty of bearing surface on either side of the bit during routing. Align the rim of the pilot bearings carefully so they’re flush with the fence facings. That way, when the bits remove all but a pair of thin corners or a centered knife edge of the plywood or solid wood, the fence will still adequately support the material on the outfeed side of the cut.

The only other finesse these bits require during setup is that the center points of their cutting profiles be centered on the material being routed. But it’s not difficult if you use the photos as guides.

Once you experience the benefits of edge V-groove bits, rolls of flimsy edge tape will likely be a thing of the past.

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Watch The Way to Woodwork: Essential Starters, Vol.1, Ep.11: Using a Hand Plane

Watch more episodes from The Way to Woodwork – Essential Starters:

1. FREE – Introduction [4:32]

2. Design to Cutting List [2:38]

3. Harvesting Parts [4:05]

4. Preparing the Stock [2:26]

5. Introduction to Butt Joints [3:32]

6. Introduction to Mortise and Tenon Joints [1:34]

7. Marking Mortise and Tenon Joints [5:20]

8. Cutting and Fitting Mortise and Tenon Joints [10:54]

9. Making Mortise and Tenons with Machines [5:17]

10. Mahogany Stool Project [2:23]

11. Using a Hand Plane [6:06] – FREE PREVIEW EPISODE

12. Cutting a Rabbet Edge [:57]

13. Clean Up and Finishing Inside Faces [1:06]

14. Gluing the Sub-Assemblies [3:12]

15. Final Assembly [1:58]

There’s more to learn! Don’t miss Vol.2, Building on Basics and Vol.3 Advancing Your Skills.

Watch The Way to Woodworker, Vol. 2, Building on Basics

Watch The Way to Woodwork, Vol. 3, Advancing Your Skills

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You can cut dovetails with a router and dovetail jig, which is a perfectly acceptable option. But if you want to make narrower pins than your dovetail jig will allow or the freedom to space the dovetail pattern as you like, then the best option is to cut your dovetail joints by hand instead.

Start by preparing your stock, cutting it to final size and making sure the ends are square. Mark the outside “show” faces on the panels, and label the corner joints to keep their orientation clear.

Lay out the tails on the front panel. Start by scribing a baseline for the tails all the way around both ends of the panel with a marking gauge. Set these scribe lines about 1/32″ deeper than the thickness of the side panels (this way, the tails will protrude ever so slightly when the joints are assembled so you can trim or sand them perfectly flush). Then lay out the centerpoints of the pins, with a half pin on the top end of the chest only. I laid mine out with eight pins, spaced 1-7/8″ apart, on center. The bottoms of the pin sockets are 1/2″ wide, and I set the angles of the tails to a 1:6 slope (about 10°). Use a sliding bevel to draw the tails to shape with a sharp, fine-point or mechanical pencil.

Extend the tail reference lines across the ends of the front panel with a square. Scribe baselines for the tails onto the back panel. Then clamp the back panel to the front panel with their inside faces against one another and so the ends and edges are even. Transfer the tail lines from the front panel to the back panel. Use these lines as references to draw a matching pattern of tails on the outside face of the back panel.

Next, saw the tails down to the baselines with a fine-toothed dovetail saw, following your layout lines. If you’re skilled with handsawing, you’ll do these freehand. But, if you’re less than confident that you can saw squarely and accurately, I tried out a clever and simple one-piece aluminum jig that I’ll highly recommend to you.

Designed by British woodworker David Barron, it guides these precision cuts to make both the tail- and pin-cutting process more foolproof. Rare-earth magnets hold the saw blade at the correct angle while you saw, to virtually eliminate angle-cutting errors. You can learn more about it by watching our demonstration video (below) or by visiting Barron’s website: davidbarronfurniture.co.uk and on his YouTube videos.

Once the tail cuts are made, remove the waste between them to create the pin sockets. You could chop the waste out with a 1/2″ chisel, working in from both faces of the panels and down to the base lines. Or, you can saw it out with a coping or fret saw first, leaving just a bit of waste at the bottom of each pin socket. Then, pare or chop this waste away, working carefully and in from both faces. When the sockets are cleaned out, make sure their baselines are flat across the panel thickness so the pins will slide into them squarely. Check the baselines with the blade of a square extended through the sockets; it should rest evenly across them. Then, carefully trim off the half-pin waste on the top end of the panels.

With the tails now cut to shape on both the front and back panels, clamp a side panel to the edge of your bench with an end facing up, and align the correct tail board over it. Carefully transfer the angled tail pattern onto its end to mark for the pins. Use a sharp, thin-bladed pocketknife or a marking knife to scribe these lines. Repeat for the other three corner joints.

Grab your marking gauge, again set 1/32″ deeper than the thickness of the front and back panel, to scribe baselines across the faces of the side panels so the pins will protrude slightly beyond when the joints are assembled. Darken the knifed pin lines with a sharp pencil to make them easier to see when sawing. Then draw straight lines down from the knifed lines on the end grain to the baselines to complete the pin shapes.

With each side panel clamped at a comfortable working height for hand-sawing, cut straight down to the baselines to form the angled faces of the pins. Again, my Barron Dovetail Guide, flipped to its pin orientation and held in place, was able to help me guide these cuts easily. Aim as best you can to literally split these layout lines with the saw blade — it will help to minimize the amount of paring you’ll have to do next to refine the fit of the joints.

Saw or chop out the waste in the tail socket areas. Effectively, the process is the same as when clearing the pin socket areas, but here there’s more waste to remove. Use wider chisels to help speed the process along, and work carefully when you’re chiseling up to the baselines to keep them straight and evenly aligned with one another. The scored baselines will give your chisel edge accurate registration here.

Now, fit the corner joints together one joint at a time. If you’ve cut carefully, the pins and tails should engage one another at least partially, right from the start. If they don’t, you’ve got some paring to do to improve the fit. The important point of note here is to pare as little material away as possible so the joints will close snugly. Remove too much, and you’ll open up gaps that will show. Remove too little, and the panels can crack if it takes excessive force to engage the dovetails. Pare only from the angled, inside faces of the pins, leaving the tail pattern alone. Work slowly and carefully. Continue to test-fit the joints until they close easily enough to tap together by hand without undue force.

The assembly process you follow will depend on the project you are building. In this example I was building a blanket chest that has a plywood bottom.The chest’s plywood bottom panel recesses into a 3/4″-wide, 3/8″-deep rabbet in the bottom inside edge of the carcass panels. I milled milled these rabbets with a wide straight bit in the router table.

Then I finish-sanded the inside faces of all four chest panels up to 180-grit and assembled the chest carcass with glue and clamps, making sure the box is square by measuring across its diagonals. Don’t rush the job — I glued up the back corner joints in one session with the front panel dry-fitted as a spacer. Then, when those joints dried, I glued the front corner joints together. Once the carcass comes out of the clamps, clean up the outside faces of the corner joints by planing or sanding until the ends of the tails and pins are flush.

Build this blanket chest.

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VIDEO: Assembling and Adjusting Hand Planes

Watch more videos from the Hand Plane Video Series:

1. Introduction to Bench Planes

2. How to Sharpen a Hand Plane

3. How to Assemble and Adjust a Hand Plane

4. Smoothing a Rough Board Face

5. Using Shooting Boards to Plane Edges

6. Rabbet Planes

7. Plow Planes

8. Compass Plane

9. Chisel Planes

10. Router Planes

11. Low-Angle Planes

12. Side Rabbet Planes and Chamfer Planes

13. Molding Planes

14. Cabinet Scraper Planes and Scratch Beaders

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The shoulder plane and its more robust cousin, the coachmaker’s plane, differ from a bench plane in one significant way — the cutting edge of the blade is as wide as the sole of the plane. This means that they can remove material in the corner of a rabbet, a very handy woodworking task, regardless of the mode of operation.

Begin by preparing the workpiece with the end square to the face and edge. Then mark out the width and depth of the rabbet with the cutting edge for both the end grain and long grain.

1. The cutting gauge is fitted with a knife sharpened on one side only. The bevel side of the knife must face the fence of the gauge so that the edge of the rabbet is marked square by the flat side of the knife. If the knife were reversed or a marking gauge were used instead, the upper edge of the rabbet would have a small chamfer.

2. Marking out an end-grain rabbet (photos 2) is done in much the same manner as marking out a single-lap dovetail — and the cutting gauge is the best tool for the job.

3. To prevent tearout, position the workpiece in the vise and chamfer the end of the rabbet right down to the finish line. Turn the chisel flat face up, position the edge halfway down the rabbet, and give it a smart tap with the heel of your hand.

4. Because the blade is a good 1/64″ wider than the sole, you must set the blade so that its edge is aligned with the side of the sole. With the end of the handle of the chisel, tap the blade to be in line with the edge of the sole. Neither blade nor handle are damaged by this operation.

5. You are ready to cut. The grip is fairly intuitive. Three fingers of your right hand go through the handle to meet the thumb. The index finger, like the grip on most tools, points forward. The left hand holds the front end of the tool, thumb on top in the depression, fingers under the sole ready to act as a guide fence. Proper setup and grip precede the practice cuts.

6. The first pass is critical: you have to stay on your side of the line — but this is not a time to be timid. What is required is a lot of controlled propelling pressure from the right hand, a lot of downward pressure from the left hand, plus a tight grip so the guide fingers on the sole present a firm buttress to keep the tool on track. All this is performed in slow motion.

7. Once you have established a shoulder, you can move along at a pace that gets the shavings coming quickly, as seen in the photo.

8. When you near the line, it’s time to clean up the vertical wall. Setting the blade flush as we did at the outset will not give a clean vertical wall. In fact, you never try to cut both walls at once. This sloping “vertical” wall is just as it should be. You now turn the body of the plane horizontal and cut the vertical wall.

9. To make this cut, hold the plane in the right hand. (The view of the photo is from the top of the board looking down.) The left hand acts as a steady in contact with the workpiece. Once you have removed the bulk of the waste, set the blade to remove fine shavings. Planing down to the line and getting a right angular corner normally requires alternately removing a shaving or two from the vertical face and the horizontal face.

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Making the Joint
1. To begin the process, simply take two adjacent boards and fold them together as though they were hinged at the intended joint. This imaginary “hinge” can be either side. Then go ahead and clamp the folded pair together in a vise to get them ready for the plane. Mark the face of the boards so you can keep their orientation as you go through the process.

2. Use a jointing plane (an 07 plane is perfect but other long bed planes will work fine) to plane the paired edges so they are flat in length and width. Use proper technique and have the plane set for a fine cut to produce fine (.003″) shavings.

3. Checks may be made with a straightedge alone because if the paired edges are flat across their thickness, they need not be square. That’s because the out-of-square angles on the two boards will cancel each other when you remove the boards and stand one edge on the other. Nevertheless, try to go for square as well, and check the paired edges with a try square.

Checking the Joint
Check 1: Rotate the top board back and forth; you will be able to feel the contact as the two faces rub one another down their length when you have the joint right. If the joint is high in the middle of the board, the top board will rotate easily around the high spot. You must remove the high spot if it is present.

Check 2: Pull down hard on one end of the top board and see if and where it lifts from the lower board.

Check 3: Just look at the joint. If contact looks good by gross inspection from 9″ to 12″ away, then put your eye right on the joint line about 1/2″ away. Light will reveal any gaps in the joint line.

Check 4: Stand the boards on end and check their alignment with a straightedge. The panel should be flat. You can take out a small bow later by planing the entire panel flat, but any large deflection should be removed before glue-up. If all these checks show the joint to be sound, go ahead and glue and clamp the panel together.

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More often than not it is understanding the small details that lead to success when mastering a woodworking technique. While a hand plane must be sharp and properly adjusted to work correctly, how a woodworker grips and stands while using the plane is important as well.

The Hand Grips
The right hand grips the rear handle. It applies downward pressure and transmits the push that comes from your legs and body. The right thumb comes around and virtually traps the second finger. The right index finger doesn’t wrap around the blade assembly; it tucks down into the casting of the frog. This grip creates a lot of control tension between the index and little fingers. If you wrap your index finger around the blade assembly, sooner or later you will move it.

The left hand grip varies according to whether you are planing a face or an edge. On a wide board, press down on the top of the front knob with the palm of the hand and curl two fingers under it to the left and right. This grip helps you exert a lot of downward pressure, along with the pull that steers the cutting action.

To plane an edge, hold the plane in a pincer-like grip. The thumb goes just forward of the mouth, with all four fingers wrapping under the sole. This grip helps you sense horizontal pressure while you apply downward pressure, and so it gives you more control and balance on a narrow edge.

Stance and Motion
The plane gets its power from your feet, which should be placed a comfortable walking pace apart. Keep your wrist, lower arm and upper arm in one line, and direct the push from your shoulder. As the cut proceeds, shift your weight from your rear foot forward, and unwind until your body has rolled over your ankles. Your more powerful lower body thus will propel the plane about 42 inches. Continue the cut by unfolding your upper body and arms, to push onward another 18 inches, more or less. This 60 inches is about the limit you can cut without traveling or walking the plane. To plane a long board you have to travel in a smooth and unhurried way. Slide your rear foot up to the front foot, then slide your front foot forward. Don’t try to cross your feet.

The post How to Use a Hand Plane: Grip, Stance and Motion appeared first on Woodworking | Blog | Videos | Plans | How To.

A room full of woodworkers will evoke spirited discussion about the right angles and methods of sharpening tools with no two finding much common ground. I think one of the least understood chisels is the mortise chisel. Catalogs offer two types, the first being a heavy square-edged chisel in 3/4″ and 1″ widths. Timber framers use these for cutting mortises in frames. First, a series of 3/4″ or 1″ holes are bored and the chisel of the appropriate width is used to clean out and square the mortise. The framer drives these chisels with a big mallet and a heavy hand. While most bench chisels are ground to 25°, an edge this thin would fail quickly in such severe service. Framing chisels are ground to a 30° or even a 35° edge.

Cabinetmakers use a London Pattern Mortise Chisel. They are sold in widths exactly the width of the mortise to be chopped. Historically, they were sold in a wide range of sizes from about 3/16″ to 11/4″. Now, they are only offered in 1/4″, 3/8″ and 1/2″, with 6mm, 10mm and 13mm being the actual sizes, as all are made abroad.

Modern London Pattern Chisels have two flaws. The first is the handle (photo below). Traditionally, mortise chisels had an oval handle, which gives the user a very precise idea of the radial alignment of the tip, thereby placing it much more precisely at the extremes of the mortise. Today, this ergonomically friendly handle is replaced by an oversized round handle that is clunky and makes radial control more difficult. Some are so big as to be humorous. A British idea of Texas, I guess?

Traditionally, mortise chisel handles were oval, giving the user a good idea of the alignment of the edge with the mortise. Today, they are round and oversized, making them clunky. Many are even larger than this example.

The second problem is the hardness—they are too hard. While most chisels, including bench and framing, should be in the 58 to 62 hardness Rockwell C Scale (HRC), this is far too hard for our London Pattern Chisel. They are meant to be pounded straight down into plank grain to considerable depth, then pried sidewise to remove material. This combination of severe pounding and prying requires the edge to be ground to 30° to 35°, but even at this steeper angle modern chisels will generally chip at the edges. The hardness is too attenuated for the bit. The solution is to remove the handle and bake the chisel in a household oven at 550° F, which is about as hot as most ovens go. This will draw the temper back to about 58 HRC, giving the edge much more toughness.

Using a London Pattern Mortise Chisel

STEP 1: After laying out the mortise with a mortising gauge set to the size of the chisel, make a series of hand-pushed cuts between the gauge lines to create a clean entry. The chisel size should be about one-third the thickness of the material you are mortising together. For this 3/4″ face frame material, 1/4″ is perfect.

STEP 2: Starting in the middle of the mortise, make alternate cuts in an area just wider than the height of the chisel. Work to full depth, which is marked with blue masking tape.

STEP 3: Now work to the ends of the mortise in 1/8″ increments. Pound to full depth and lever waste up and out of the mortise.

STEP 4: The result is a mortise that is exactly the width of the chisel. By laying out the tenon with the same mortising gauge, you can get a perfect fit right off the backsaw.

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