Google Analytics Alternative

Chips ‘n Tips 13: Refining Unusual Angles

9 comments
9 years ago
Chips N Tips     Hand Planing

shooting board odd angleMost shooting boards will make a 90 cut and a 45 degree cut with the addition of a simple fence. Or perhaps you have a dedicated miter shooting board for 45 degree cuts. Some fancier shooting boards have adjustable fences with stops at other common angles like 22.5 degrees. But when your project throws an unusual angle at you, don’t panic…just bring a towel…er I mean keep your off cut.

With the off cut you can create a custom angle shooting board. Its like really bad slight of hand magic!

Leave a Comment:

All fields with “*” are required

jeremy

Good tip for repetitive odd medium size angles. A related tip (from Ron Herman) is to make a 1° nickle line on your fence, such that when you roll a nickle up to it, you will tweak that end by a fixed amount. Especially helpful for working with things that are supposed to be square, but aren’t. it could probably be adapted for our cashless society (bitcoin excluded) with a credit card or some other common precise thickness item.

    Shannon

    That’s an excellent tip, Ron is full of those little things.

John Verreault

That was a fantastic tip Shannon. I wish that I had seen it about 2 weeks ago when I was trying to sort out how to fine tune an odd angle I needed to cut. Now I know. Thanks for the great tip and I hope you manage to get those previous Chips ‘n Tips prizes doled out…

Cheers

John

Steve

Cool idea! Now of course I’m wondering whether to save those odd angled offcuts that I’ve cleaned up for future shooting. I know it’s only a couple of minutes to clean up the offcut to get it ready, but the frugalist (clearly not “hoarder” 🙂 in me is seeing an opportunity…

    Shannon

    Only you can answer that Steve. If you find yourself using the same angles a lot then it might be worthwhile…as long as you have a place to keep them organized and you don’t forget you have them.

Claire

Love your work Shannon. Thanks.
That was a bit strange, though, you fixed one side of the joint so that you could then adjust the other side. And the first side was quicker than the second side.
Nonetheless, a clever trick that is useful in other situations as well – clamping and the like.

    Shannon

    I can understand your confusion Claire. The key to remember is that now you can repeat whatever that angle is on multiple parts. In the case of this project I need to create the same angle 15 more times. I’m pretty good with a saw and block plane, but that’s asking a lot to assume I will get the angle right that many times doing it free hand. Morever, let’s say I got the angle wrong from the start and instead of it being 5 dgrees, it was 3.89 degrees. It doesn’t matter because the work I put into that initial fence set up locks in that angle and it will be the same for all the other parts.

Dave

Cool tip. In order for it to be accurate, the other end of the off-cut would have had to be cut to a precise 90 degree angle first, otherwise when registered against the shooting board fence, the final angle wouldn’t be the 5 degrees you were going for.

    Shannon

    Yes of course, I did plane the other end as assumed (wrongfully) that part would have been obvious. However, its almost a superfluous step because once you have the fence locked in place it will produce the same angle each time. It may not be the 5 degrees I originally wanted but seeing as the resulting angle will be the same it doesn’t matter if it is 5 or 4.23 or 6.2345 degrees. So any deviation created by a non 90 degree opposite face won’t due much harm unless you are dramatically off 90.