Wood-fired!

Working with very fine stock

April 6th, 2008

I’m rather fond of small boxes like this one that I made some years ago. I produced a number of these for an artist friend who was giving them as gifts on a trip to her homeland of Japan.
I like the constructed look of the top panel (for some reason I favour building from elements over starting with a whole and subtracting the negative space - perhaps it’s respect for the material - Huon in this case - and not wanting to waste any). I also enjoy the light openness and the fact that a perforated box is good for holding aromatics (there’s that food thing again!).

I’m just starting to experiment with something similar but with open-work on all sides of a cube.
One side will be based on a traditional shoji design. The whole cube will only be 65mm on a side so the stock involved is small - probably 3mm square. I’m using straight-grained Huon pine. Planing stock at this size can be problematic especially when you want to use your favourite No. 6. For those you don’t know the relative size the photo on the left gives you some idea.

Before I’d had to think about how to do this, I was browsing the excellent blog of a US woodworker The Village Carpenter and saw her entry about her favourite jig. I could see the great value of this jig - especially for working with small stock.
Small stock is flexible so it needs to be planed on a flat surface - holding it in a vice is difficult because there’s not much to clamp on to and any lack of perfect support along the length of the vice jaws will allow the stock to press into the jaws and you end up with a stick of varying thickness.

The standard way of planing a stick out of the vise is to lay it on the bench with one end butted against a stop of some sort. Again very small stock is flexible and will easily bend and possibly break if any significant force is applied.

This jig offers a way of holding small stock on a flat surface and of clamping it along its entire length so that it has nowhere to go.

Building the jig only took a few minutes. I made mine with low fences so they didn’t get in the way of handling the small stock. I wanted to plane stock down to 3mm so I needed to make my wedge thinner than this and I needed a thin packer to move the stock away from the straight fence.

After trying a few materials I settled on some 1.5mm matboard. It doesn’t lie completely flat but I haven’t had any trouble with this yet. If I really need a strong thin flat material that will grip the stock well and will stay very flat I will use some 2mm picture glass but the edge that clamps the stock will need to be ground flat.

I made an additional pair of wedge and packer out of 3mm MDF for planing stock that is greater than 3mm but less than the height of the fence.

This jig worked very well for me and I expect it will get a lot of use in my workshop.

Postscript: I’ve reduced my stock size to 2mm x 3mm and the jig still performs well planing down to 2mm!

Entry Filed under: Wood