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16 October 2017 at 9:00 pm #335386
Thank you both for your responses, I just wanted to post a follow-up, in case someone came upon this later.
As a starting off point, your ideas were great, but I was surprised at what ended up making the difference. After a while of struggling to square the width of the board throughout the length, I ground a problematic #4 plane’s iron to a curve and used it as a scrub plane. This made the diagonal passes go much quicker, and I was able to knock down high areas with a little more ease. Also, I stopped using a square after every pass, and started sighting the board from the end. I was astonished at how quickly this allowed me to see what I had to do and where. This probably had the biggest impact on my work, and I was able to square beams width and length in a matter of an hour instead of a whole morning. Then, I was able to do lengthwise passes with a #4 with a straight iron – the plane did not do a very good job straightening the board out lengthwise, but it was easy to see where I needed to adjust and do shorter passes to flatten out peaks.
One last thing that really helped was to lay out my boards in the order I wanted them and when I went to straighten them lengthwise, I stopped worrying about how actually flat they were, and only worried about how they registered against the next board. I was able to get the job done pretty quickly without having a long, accurate straight edge or fiddling with string (which I tried and got frustrated with).
This job only required exactly as much precision as it needed, so I got away with some shortcuts. I am looking forward to working with some smaller stock on my next project.
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