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Dressing the Panel
If you have prepared your panel with care, dressing the panel
using your planes should be as easy as planing a single board.
Use a jointer plane to remove any twist or slight cupping. Then
follow that with the smoothing plane. However, if you do have
a lot of material to remove, there is a traditional strategy
that can help. If you plane directly across a panel, you can
take a thicker shaving using less effort — this is called
traversing.
If my panel's seams are misaligned by 1/32" or so, I will
traverse the panel with my jointer plane. If my seams are out
by more than that, I will traverse the panel first with a plane
designed to take a thick shaving (such as a fore, jack or scrub
plane). Then I will follow up with a jointer plane.
All this is followed by strokes with a fine-set smoothing plane.
If I have taken care through every step of the process, this
part of the work is brief and enjoyable.
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Before you traverse any board, be sure to plane a small
chamfer on the outfeed edge. Otherwise, the edge will
splinter (this is called spelching).
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A well-prepared panel shouldn't require more than a
few minutes with the smoothing plane to dress. As a bonus,
you won't have to sharpen or adjust your smoothing plane
as often. |
Christopher
Schwarz
Editor, Popular Woodworking magazine |
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