Chisel it away

Hold it straight:
To create a neat cut when making a stopped housing, mortise or dovetail joint, the chisel must be held precisely perpendicular to the wood. One way to guide the chisel is to hold a square block tight up against the blade. Or try clamping a board with a straight edge along the chisel line.

Another angle:
Perpendicular chisel cuts to remove waste in dovetail joints rarely line up at the halfway point where the cuts meet from the two opposite sides. Ridges that jut out at the halfway point require a separate removal step. To avoid this extra step, after making the first initial cuts along the marking lines with the chisel perpendicular to the work, continue the remaining cuts with the blade angled away from the waste slightly.

Plane sense

It’s just scribble:
It’s hard to know if you’ve missed a spot after planing a large surface. Here’s one way to be sure. Before you start planing, scribble on the surface with a pencil. As you plane, the scribbling will disappear. Repeat this step for additional passes.

No more splinters:
To keep the end of a workpiece from splintering as it’s being planed, clamp a block of scrap wood to the end. The height of the scrap should be the same as the height of the work.

Knotty solution:
If there’s a knot close to an edge that you want to plane, try holding the plane at an angle. The slicing action you get from an angled blade will yield a better cut than a standard pass.

Holding block:
When planing a long board, you may find that the clamps interfere with the plane. To avoid having to reposition the clamps, make two V-shaped holding blocks, and clamp the blocks rather than the workpiece. With the clamps out of the way, you can plane the work without encountermg any interference.

Too small for a planer?
Here’s how to plane short pieces of timber in a thickness planer. Glue an off cut of wood to each side of the work, with the bottom faces of all three pieces flush. After planing, tap the off cuts to break them from the work. To plane wood under 1/2″ (13 mm) thick, use cloth-backed, double-sided carpet tape to attach the wood to a wider piece of waste timber at least 1″ (25 mm) longer than the work. (The waste must be of a uniform thickness and free of warps.)