Milling Rough Lumber Without a Jointer Using a Few Simple Jigs

In my store tour video I mentioned that I don't have a

jointer

, so I got a ton of requests to make a video to show how to mill raw wood without one, so here it is, when you buy raw wood like this, There are no straight or square edges, the board can also be twisted, cupped or arched, it is not good for construction and just like a board has four sides, the

milling

process will be done in four steps, so the The first step in the

milling

process after preliminary cutting to length is to make one face of the board flat.

The ideal tool to do this is a

jointer

, but we could solve the problem of not having the right tools by just

using

a few

simple

templates for this first step. I used a super

simple

jointer jig on the planer. and you might be wondering if I have a planer, why can't I just run the board th

rough

it like that? This is because a planer simply makes one face parallel to another face, so if you have a board that has a twist and you send it th

rough

the planer, the cutters will follow whatever is on the bottom of the board so that its board will be smooth on top but will still have a twist.

The same goes for a cup or a loop, this happens because inside the planer there are these rollers that put so much pressure on the wood to help the wood move forward and since there is so much pressure it flattens the boards if there is a cup, a twist or an arc as you cut through the top, but when it comes back out the other side it will snap back into shape and have the same twist it had when you sent it in, so that's where this joining jig comes in handy and couldn't be more Simple, it's just a piece of scrap metal. which is attached to a long, flat piece of mdf.

I got this idea from Colin on woodwork web, so I'll link his video below. It has a ton of information on this, so here's how it works: You grab the board you want. flattening and you find all the high spots you can do this by seeing the board rock back and forth you can clearly see a visible gap there just take a wedge and put it underneath and now when you try to rock it it doesn't. It swings longer and is stable, so this board only has one twist, but it would be different for something that has a cup or arch like a board like this.

You can see here that this board is also hollowed out, so I like to leave these on. Like little thin pieces over here and I would just put them underneath in the middle and get the right thickness for the piece of wood that I'm

using

so that it doesn't flatten out when the rollers push it through the same thing. for a bow you would do it in that direction but for now I'm just going to use this board make sure it doesn't sway and this one only needs one wedge but usually when I do this on longer or rougher boards there are like a lot of wedges in different places and to secure it in place I will just put a little bit of hot glue on each side and then press it down this way the hot glue secures the wedge to the board and also secures the board to the boat because this board doesn't have that many wedges, I'm just going to add a little bit of hot glue to these edges just to keep it a little bit more secure now that the piece is secure and the cutter heads are going to cut the top of this board parallel to this flat piece of mdf instead of the bottom twist of this board, but before I send it through the planer I just want to talk about the green direction for a second.

If you look at the side of the board here, you can see that the grain is running in one direction or another, so this is the direction that I want to feed my workpiece into the machine because it will cause less tearing because it goes with the grain if I try send it this way to the cutting heads. then it would go against the grain causing tears, this could be difficult on pieces where the green runs in all different directions, like this board here, just try to find the direction where the most of the grain will place the cutting head .

I pick it up. high above the workpiece and place everything on the planer, then I lower the cutter head until I see that the indicator has touched some material, then I make two full turns back to raise the cutter head, take out the template and the work piece. then I back off those two full rotations to get back to that depth and then, just to be safe from any high spots, I'll back it off a quarter turn. I don't do this every time I use the planer because I think it's easy to see the difference between raw wood and freshly cut wood, but for the sake of the video, I'll just scribble some marks on the wood here so you can see the progress. how to clean it.

Now that it's ready to go, you can see. that the planer has started to clean up all the high spots and I will continue to lower the cutter head with each pass until I see all those scribble lines disappear, so now the top of this board is parallel to this mdf board and just a Note that if you don't have a planer and you have a router, you can do basically the same thing with a router sled: simply shim the board until it stops rocking and then use the router to flatten the top face. Let's try to see how.

Flat, this board comes off easily from hot glue, if something gets stuck in the MDF, just chisel it right away, now flip it over on that newly smooth side, okay, no more amazing rocking, I just did exactly what the jointer would work without using a jointer, so the next step in the milling process, if you have all the right tools, would be to use a planer, so you take the newly joined face and place it on the base of the planer and then the second . The face becomes parallel to the first face, so there will be nothing different in this step if you have a planer, so all you need to do is run the board using that newly flattened surface at the base that the cutter heads will make. in this second. face parallel to the first one just like a planer is supposed to do and boom, I have a board that used to be all twisted and twisted and now there are two faces that are parallel to each other.

One thing to note here is that my joining jig is 48 inches long and this has worked for me because I usually cut to size before starting this routing process. I once needed a super long one, so I have this super long one here that I only used once for a specific purpose. project, but this has been working for me, so just make yours the same size as the typical projects you work with before moving on to step three of the mailing process. Just a quick break to talk about this week's cool sponsor policy, so tools like planers and jointers help you turn raw

lumber

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lumber

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The next step would be to make one of the edges square with those faces. Right now, this is not even close to square. You can see a big space. there and this is maybe easier this way, let's go okay, so the correct tool to do this would be to use a jointer on the edge like this, pretend for a second that this is a jointer like here would be the blade, so if Take the face that was already flat against a guide on the back and then run it along the jointer. The blades here are going to cut this edge square up to the face that is against the fence on the jointer, so there are a few ways to do it.

This without having a jointer, but you might be wondering why you can't just rip the board like this through the table saw and that will create straight edges. It is because the boards that are roughed in the lumber yard do not have straight lines. edges so you see the straight edge swings back and forth, so if you just run it along the guide on your table, see that the cut the blade will make will follow that curve, so it won't create a straight line. cut unless you have a straight reference against the fence, one of the ways I like to do this is with a tapered jig because it has a straight edge that is referenced along the fence as you make a cut or If you have a miter bar on it simply slides into the miter slot always creating a square edge, so this is one of the most common questions I get: how do you know where to line up your board on the taper jig to make that cut? square since there are no square references? on the board, so the answer is that it doesn't matter at all where you place the board, you can set it to cut this board in a strange shape and this step is just making a square edge with the two faces, they are still not making everything board be square, that will happen in step four, so this board is a great example to show you this because of this weird corner here that needs to be cut, so I'm I'm going to put this on the taper template right where that is. crooked edge and it's going to make like a cut on this board where the result is going to be a really weird shape, not square, so what I'm looking for here is just a uniform amount of overhang along the edge has nothing to do with the quadrature on both sides of the board.

I'm just cutting off all the bad parts I don't want, then I could lock the guide in place and then use the clamps. to attach the board to the template and now I just need to cut that edge and so, this board has a square edge, but you can see it's a weird shape, so the squareness of the entire board doesn't matter at this point. point, this taper jig is 30 inches long so it works for most of the applications I need, but sometimes I need to attach a longer piece and there is an even simpler way to do it, so this piece of walnut It's longer than the template so it wouldn't be safe to use this to attach that edge so what I would do is take a piece of plywood and I'm going to use that as a reference against the fence and I'm just going to use double sided tape.

To temporarily put that board on that piece I sometimes use hot glue, it also depends on what kind of mood I'm in and again this board doesn't have to be straight or square to anything when you're lining it up. I just want to make sure all the parts you want to cut are hanging off the edge and then just like before just run it through the table saw and this cut refers to that straight edge of the plywood now that the rough edge is all cut out, you can remove it from the plywood and you will have a newly square edge and sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all this stuff so I'll just make a check or some kind of marker symbol so that I know this is the square edge newly joined.

Sometimes if the piece is very long I use my chain saw, so this would just run along the edge here, making a square edge with this top face. This would be the same as using a circular. Saw with an edge guide and that's the way I used to do it before I had this. You can also use a router table as a jointer. I actually posted a video a long time ago on how to do this, but basically go figure. the router table is like a jointer flipped on its edge so the fence here is actually like the bed of the jointer and you would put the outfeed fence like you offset it a little bit just to make room for the amount that is cutting.

So it's actually a really cool process and I'll add the link tobelow if you are interested in learning more. Another great way to get around not having a jointer is to simply use a straightedge and pattern bit on your router, so if you take a known straightedge, like something man-made like plywood or mdf, and tape it down double-sided to a slightly protruding workpiece, then the bearing of this drill bit will ride along this ruler, creating a ruler on your board. to the last step here, so the board has two faces that are flat and parallel to each other and it has an edge that is square with both faces and now the last step in the process is to make the opposite edge square with the faces. and also parallel to the opposite edge because if you look at the board here at the bottom it's about four inches wide and at the top it's about three inches wide because of that angled cut that we made with the taper jig normally that difference is not so drastic, I just wanted to show you how in that third step where you're just squaring up that first edge, it doesn't matter if it's a straight cut, whether it's on the router table as a jointer or using the pattern bit or any of the other methods In the ones where you use a ruler against the fence, the square edge that was cut in the third step will now be against the fence, so the cut I'm making now will do two things: It will make this edge parallel to the edge that is against the fence. and it will also make it square with the faces because the blade is 90 degrees to the boom of the square butt, that's basically how you turn the raw wood into a usable square butt and now it's ready to be used well, so everything that I just did I'll mill it a little bit oversized so maybe like an eighth or a sixteenth it doesn't really matter exactly how much it's slightly oversized and the reason for that is because of the moisture content so there's still a ton of moisture in This wood and as you remove layers, you are exposing the inner core of the wood, which probably has more moisture than the outside, so the outside is going to dry out, and then it might bend, twist, bow, cup or something like that while you use it, to avoid it after doing this whole process.

Like I just showed you, I then take it inside my house, stack it and stick it overnight or for a few days so the top layer that I just milled can dry and then if it moves on me then I could just mill that little one a little bit and bring it to its final dimension and then it will be ready to be used, so I hope this has been useful for all of you who don't have jointers. I think it's really cool that even if you don't have the right tools, there is always a template or solution to get the same results, while I hope to get a jointer one day and I think it will make my life a little easier.

I think these are great alternatives if you don't have those tools. Thank you all so much for watching, thank you to the policy genius for sponsoring this video and I'll see you in the next one before I have to sneeze. This rule is great. Who calls me?