Use a Hand Plane to Square Up Large Stock

Over the next few weeks I'll be spending most of my blog writing time either filming or editing videos for use in my upcoming Workbench Class (at Home). I'll be posting them here as they are completed.

Here's the first installment. It goes over the process I use to do the final square-up on large stock. In the video I'm working on the legs of a workbench. But you can use this process on a lot of different parts in your own work. I use the same process to bring the edges of each bench slab into square with the tops.

This stock was initially jointed on two faces using my power jointer. But after several passes through my thickness planer, I no longer trust them to be "perfectly square." I take this into account when I'm prepping the stock by leaving the parts about 50 thou over sized. Once I've gone through the process shown in the video, I go back to the planer and run each part through one more time to bring each dimension down to final thickness. And I'm extremely careful not to plane the faces I've just trued up.