Two shooting boards
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / Two shooting boards
- This topic has 10 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 10 months ago by Peter George.
-
AuthorPosts
-
25 January 2015 at 10:18 pm #123872
Here’s two shooting boards that I made from some scrap baltic birch plywood. One is a dedicated mitre shooting board (I do a lot of picture frames) and the other one has a “donkey’s ear” that I can attach to it.
I’ve been experimenting with some small boxes with mitred corners and the donkey’s ear works perfectly for that.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.26 January 2015 at 1:21 am #123876Hi Peter
You did a good job on them. They are important adds in the shop, they will give you good service , if I may suggest give the runner a GOOD coat of wax. And keep them well wàxed. At least I have found it makes a big difference in how well they work.
Frankj26 January 2015 at 3:48 am #123885I had some UHMW (low friction) tape left over from another project, so I applied that to the runners. So far, it’s working very well.
I love that the shooting boards allow me to get better precision and quality of cut than I get from the table saw. One more step toward hand tools only. 🙂
26 January 2015 at 10:09 pm #123929These look great, Peter. Did you get the 45’s perfect with a combination square?
I’ve had shooting boards on my list for quite some time. My old crappy one isn’t giving perfectly square cuts anymore, so I have to shim the fence with a piece of paper.
27 January 2015 at 1:03 am #123934Actually, I cheated. 🙂
I didn’t do any joinery. The base on both is 1/2 inch baltic birch plywood. I applied a 1/4 inch piece to form the track. The fences are built up of two layers of 3/4 inch. I took a page from Paul’s book and stuck everything together with double sided tape which I clamped in the vise for good adhesion. It took me about an hour and a half for both, most of that was ensuring that everything was square.
The trick with the mitre board is to make sure the angle at the point is exactly 90 degrees. That way, if you shoot one side of the mitre on one side and the other on the other side, if there any variance, it will be opposite on each side, and therefore canceled out. I used my mitre square to get the fence as close to 45 as possible.
The donkey’s ear is scrap plywood, glued and nailed. Again, the most important part is to make sure the angles are as close as you can get them. (Hint, never expect the factory edges on plywood to be either straight or square. That caused me some grief. :~ )
7 June 2016 at 4:38 am #137628Hi everyone,
Would somebody be kind enough to explain a bit more why we use a donkey ear…? Stupid question, but …!
Tx
Hugo
How does the donkey ear stay on? Is it a single peg pls a wedge?
(Hugo- A donkey’s ear is for dressing bevels (like http://newtowoodworking.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bevel2.jpg or like http://www.leeswoodprojects.com/images/miter_joint.jpg ) rather than miters (like http://www.thecabinetmaker.info/Mitre%20Joint.jpg ) )
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.