Truing Stock With Hand Planes - Nested Tables 3

This weekend was all about truing my stock for the nested tables. I have some fine mahogany shorts that are going to be perfect for the legs of my tables. They are just a little more than 6/4ths, which is just enough to true the faces. They are just wide enough to get 4 legs out of each board. These are part of the hoard of mahogany I got from a cabinetmaker who was going out of business. He was a victim of the mortgage crises.



In the first pic, you can see me jointing the first board with my KK-6. This is a crappy plane. It's frog is decidedly inferior and is very fussy to adjust. I swear I'm going to use it for a boat anchor and get a Lie Nielsen or at least a Stanley Bedrock. Nevertheless, after fussing around with it, I got it adjusted sufficiently to get a good reference edge.



In the second picture you can see me facing the piece. Note the handy planing stop. This is a piece of plywood screwed to a scrap of white oak that is griped in my vice. The stop can be tilted up or down for any thickness of wood and gives square support across my entire workbench. This idea came out of Chris Schwarz's book on workbenches from Popular Woodworking.

If you look closely, you can see my traditional jointer's mark on the reference edge (pointing the wrong way, unfortunately).



Next, I'm using my fancy artistic winding sticks, which are really two pieces of aluminum angle from the Orange Borg, artistically painted with Oleum de Ruste. Actually, extruded aluminum angle is dam straight and makes a fine winding stick and straight edge. It's also extremely cheap.

Finally, you can see my little Stanley #4 smoothing plane finishing off the piece. I have three more pieces of stock to prepare for my legs, then I will hold a mass ripping event and rip all twelve legs in one session.