Thread: "Shooting" history & shooting boards.

To add here as a reference of sorts, a link to an article I wrote in 2008:

Setting Up and Using a Shooting Board


This was perhaps the first article mentioning ramped boards (which I first saw Terry Gordon using one made my Michael Connor a few years earlier). The article was posted on and referenced by FWW magazine website.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

To add here as a reference of sorts, a link to an article I wrote in 2008:

Setting Up and Using a Shooting Board


This was perhaps the first article mentioning ramped boards (which I first saw Terry Gordon using one made my Michael Connor a few years earlier). The article was posted on and referenced by FWW magazine website.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek, while I agree a ramped shooting board offers the advantage of wider wear on the. blade and is a softer engagement with the work because it allows the blade to enter at a corner first rather than right across the face of the work, your article still propounds a myth which I recall I took issue at the time you published it. Namely that it is not a real skew “ ( the angle is too low for that)”. You are correct if you leave it at it is not a real skew. No matter what angle you make the ramp it is never a “real skew”. All you are doing is attacking the work from a different angle but because the direction of travel of the plane is parallel to the long axis of the plane ie always perpendicular to the blade it is always a standard cut. You would have to move the plane at an angle to the long axis of the plane to get a real skew. That is you would have to make a ramped carriage for the plane to travel in, to get a true skew cut with a bench plane. A shooting board plane of course moves parallel to the long axis but the skew is achieved in the design by skewing the blade in the body as we all know.
cheers
M

Mic, I think that you are reading more into what I wrote than I intended, even back then. Remember that that article was written in 2008, well before arguments about a ramped board and skew cuts. My comment should have stated that a ramped board does not equate to a skew cut as with a plane, such as the Stanley #51. It also does not enable the blade to wear more widely. All it does - and this is worthwhile enough to have a ramped board - is reduce the impact when the blade hits the workpiece. I have made these points repeatedly over the years.

Regards from Perth

Derek

It should be noted that the use of the term shooting in Moxon and Nicholson meant to plane edges straight. The books don't mention shooting jigs and when they discuss planing end grain, like in the case of mitres, the tool used is a strike plane and plane and piece held with your hands, no mention of a jig.

In modern times the term seems to be tied to planing endgrain and the use of shooting boards.

If you do want to plane the end of a board, for whatever reason, the shooting board is helpful. That's what we do today, the designs that are popular today expose endgrain as a feature. That's not something that everybody considers esthetically pleasing. End grain is not exposed in traditional cabinets.

It seems like a non issue, if what you're making doesn't need the ends to be shot, then don't bother w shooting boards or specialty planes.

Rafael

Damnit, i read this earlier and didn't comment and raffo beat me to it. Moxon is talking about long and short edges - in the days before copious clamps, and also where speed mattered in a non industrial setting, a rub joint is valuable.

Also, no plywood for drawer bottoms, you make your own thin drawer bottoms - shooting edges is mentioned in favor of making those joints closeable without clamps. Count the time you take using clamps, and it's probably still faster if you can do such a thing. I clamp joints out of vanity and because my shop is too cold for hot hide glue. Vanity as in I want the joint to be invisible - completely, especially if wood is quartered. A rub joint would probably be invisible.

there is probably mention in nicholson and moxon (miters were pointed out) for miters as well as maybe for small pieces, especially if a combination of the two.

And there is more fitting now of sticking in pieces or frames where there are butt joints and screws or dowels are used. If these pieces are M&T, there is no need to shoot anything - you saw the stock reasonably neatly and then mark referencing the sides. the practice of a wheel gauge going around the end of a board that had to be shot is a relatively bizarre one.

And for hand sawing something that has been marked, the error is probably a couple of thousandths - which goes back to what if you do everything by hand. If you do, there will be familiarity and competence to do things to very very tight tolerance just off of the saw. I've made drawers with hand sawed ends that were marked and then planed the tiny excess off to flush after the drawer is fitted.

this is replaced for a power tool woodworker if desired by a good crosscut sled and a fixed stop. By hand, the pieces are marked off of each other so they are close to identical - you're sawing and marking those pieces by hand, so the idea of making 24 drawer sides or something that are identical in length isn't there. At least when it is, you use a good one to mark another and probably do the drawers a little at a time. Rate of work isn't affected by not batching 10 things at a time (which I think a lot of us find boring and tiring mentally because you can go to sleep at the wheel pretty easily or get very tired of cutting 400 dovetails in a row.)

I do have a miter jack for large miter joints. It's necessary for mouldings as a shooting board often falls short for doing larger mouldings. For those on an actual case, I strike the moulding and then cut the moulding close to size and mark and then adjust the ends to each other. If the moulding is relaly large, I carve the center out of it only just so that it's not in the way of fitting. I would bet that was very popular a couple of hundred years ago if a moulding was too small to create out of facing and some bracketing, but big enough to have a significant contact section.

Fitting then takes a couple of minutes per corner and there is never an accidental "oh di-urea - it's too short now!"

Nicholson and holtzapffel come to mind for me, though - they are very careful to talk about planing, how planes work, grinding shallower than the final angle and honing only the business part of a tool, and so on, but square shooting fixtures are not described in joining wood. Shooting edges is, though - surprisingly for nicholson, it seems like nearly all of them with less emphasis on bookmatch planing in a vise.

many other cases where there could be visible end grain - doors, for example, the stiles are left long and then cut and planed or planed flush after everything is done - once again negating the need for ends to be shot.

I figured at least from the early/mid 1900s on, it must've become standard or more common - but why? Was it for flushing interior trim? I don't know. did it arise around the time that handsaws were knocked out of the job site by the circular saw? I figured popularity not based on that speculation, but because planes started to show up with words like "technical" - record's version showing up in 1939.

holtapffel's text info. The volume is called turning and mechanical manipulation. years ago, I saved the PDF and then bought the paperback reprints to read about abrasives and known natural stones.

And did little else. the ornamental turning stuff is intense and just not for us - think rose engine lathe and other such things.

Turning and Mechanical Manipulation: Intended as a Work of General Reference ... - Charles Holtzapffel - Google Books

this is a link to the 1874 or 1875 reprint - there are two or three, so other than some dated references to iron bottom planes patented in america, probably not much has changed.

There is talk of shooting ends. but in describing how to dimension wood somewhere around page 500, the end shooting is narrowed to thin boards. which we're already aware of being kind of flimsy and narrow for typical work.

the section before describes making a square parallelogram of wood and that the marking of the ends is at the tail end of the process and is anticipation of sawing.

I don't think most people appreciate just how good they could get sawing to a mark to a near finished surface - like as a matter of routine work. I'm contending above that shooting ends became popular around the same time that the hand saw was eliminated as an economically viable tool across trades. 1935 or so is when the skil saw hit here and just decimated hand saw companies.

If you want to read the whole section from this book - it will make you see in text things you just would think nonverbally and give a good indication of how difficult it is to describe common sense things that are easier to understand with experience. The funny part of the discussion is mentioning that shot ends should be planed to width later because of the "evil" of shooting, creating damage to stock.

You'll also note the description of the miter plane. it's for difficult and hard woods sharpened to a 60 degree angle and useful for edges and presumably faces if desired (I'd have to reread it to confirm the part about faces).

The stanley adjustable metal smoother eliminated the virtues of a metal miter plane over a lighter coffin smoother of beech which definitely can be punishing (elbows and hands) in really hard or nasty wood. There's just not enough mass in a coffin smoother and interrupted cuts are hard on wedge set, as is shooting ends with a wedged plane.

Before the discussion heats up, folks, remember there are, and always have been, different methods of work. It has been pointed out that Moxon himself was a publisher, not a joyner., he could only record what he was told or observed & just how much "field research" he was able to do, who knows? I'd make a small wager that methods varied widely, even in little old England. In addition, we know things were often done differently on the continent, and there had been several influxes of continental woodworkers by then, thanks to various political upheavals, so there would surely have been some hybridisation when a Dutch or Huegenot worker got a job in an English shop.

Some of what we "know" about tools & methods comes from studying old pieces and from what I've read (& the little I've seen), there was a deal of variation in exactly how things were done, so it would be dangerous to make sweeping generalisations about methods of work and exactly which tools were used for what even 100 years ago.

For me, shooting end-grain is a "necessary evil" on rare occasions now, like sneaking up on a tight fit for dividers in a box or similar - a good tablesaw has obviated 99% of end-shooting in my shed, but I can see that many might need or simply want to do it on a more regular basis. For those who do want to shoot, there is a choice of tools & jig layouts, so go with what seems the best way to you.

Derek & Michael, I will not enter the argument about whether using a ramped board is a skewed cut or not, it depends entirely on how restrictivet your definition of 'skewed' is. However, Michael is correct that using an inclined ramp uses more of the blade than a flat one, whether the plane has a skewed or square blade. With a flat ramp, the position of any point on the blade (be it square or skewed) meeting the work remains at the same relative height vis a vis the workpiece throughout the cut. With a ramped board, any point on the blade will descend at the ramp angle as the cut proceeds and some of the blade that was above the top of the workpioece at the start of the stroke will gradually come into play. A ramped board will result in using a wider section of blade than a flat one...

Cheers,

Nicholson trained as a cabinetmaker in the 1780s. We could use his 1812 book as reference. Even contrast it with Moxon's. I've heard Ian's argument before. These authors should not be taken as gospel, but neither should the guesses of people who just imagine what the working methods of the past were. There are many surviving pieces of furniture that can inform us.

Mechanical Exercises; or the Elements and Practice of Carpentry, &c : Peter Nicholson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Page 158, the link above, starts a series of definitions on common tasks related to stock preparation. Shooting is mentioned there, but the term is not applied to planing ends of boards.

I made a box for an oilstone out of Bubinga some time ago. The ends off of the saw were pretty darn good, I might have just sanded it a bit. If good cuts can be done today with a simple saw, it certainly was possible in the past.

Rafael

20210103_015030.jpg20210131_234105.jpg

I've done a fair bit of research on the making of Yosegi & Tunbridge ware. Information is very scare with more available about Yosegi, purely because the art is still practiced today. The process of making Tunbridge ware however seems to have almost been protected proprietary knowledge, with very little published about it.

The "traditional" Yosegi making skills have been preserved, though updated somewhat with the implementation of modern machinery. Powered machines such as gang saws, veneer slicing machines, even un-powered mitre guillotines to take thin veneers of small blocks. Hand planes and various accessories i.e. "boards" were used in most stages of the traditional making process to "size" components.

My point, there is a heck of a lot we don't know about the traditional makers, and their processes, purely because much of it was protected and only passed from master to apprentice as is highly evident with the making of Tunbridge ware.

Originally Posted by IanW

restrictivet your definition of 'skewed' is.
Cheers,

No Ian, I have to disagree with you on this. Skew always has referred to the direction of travel of the plane relative to its long axis. Pushing the plane straight along the axis is a standard cut, pushing at an angle to the long axis is a skewed cut. The orientation of the workpiece is irrelevant. If we take this out of the context of the shooting board to say flattening a panel, can you imagine how stupid it would sound if I said I plane the panel from different angles because it introduces a skew? That's all you're doing with a ramped board, changing the orientation of the workpiece not the motion of the plane, you can never call it a skew cut, no matter how restrictive the definition. Someone recently told me in teaching concision and precision of language is important.

This myth has poisoned discussion on ramped boards on forums around the world, which are great, but simply because the blade initially hits a corner of the work rather than contacting right along the face of the work with the resulting shock from that.

Derek still argues that the ramp introduces a skew (everything is on the internet, but I'm not going to put references here... yet). He has submitted his article in this thread as a reference in the ART. All I'm saying is that all errors and inaccuracies should be minimised if a document is to stand as a teaching and reference resource.

To Derek, the only small section I have trouble with in this document is this passage (outer quotations and the underlining are mine) The underline highlights the factual errors which continues to promote the myth that a ramped board introduces a skew albiet very small.

'Why the ramp?
While the ramped board does not offer a "real" skew (the angle is too low for that), the skewed blade still enters the wood progressively, rather than all at once. This does produce a less jarring contact compared with a straight blade on a flat shooting board.'


All I ask is that this be changed to something like this:


'Why the ramp?
While the ramped board does not offer a skew, the blade still enters the wood progressively, rather than all at once. This does produce a less jarring contact compared with a straight blade on a flat shooting board.'

How about we go back to the historical references in literature to "shooting" and shooting boards.

Originally Posted by Mobyturns

How about we go back to the historical references in literature to "shooting" and shooting boards.

I'm actually very sorry I have hijacked this thread, I can't believe I'm still having to call this out, but Derek has posted his article here as a reference in the ART. I'm just calling out a big error in one very small section of a wonderful document, which I will continue to do with anything that is promoted as a reference resource.

Shooting boards and using them for the likes of fitting of box internals dividers or jointing veneers and cross banding joints is all pretty basic standard shoot board use. Everyone should have a shooting board or two and a bench hook or two close by. When I'm doing parquetry topped tables all the pieces are jointed on the shooting board. They didn't get used much if at all in general standard furniture joinery . Like if your building tables and cabinets there is never really a need for them.

A step not to far away from shooting boards and what I think is very interesting historically is when it comes to dealing with end grain is the cutting of accurate tenons and joints for mitres is the Mitre jack and the Chair making vise.

I reckon the mitre jack wasn't a tool many guys had sitting in there workshops just for mitre joints. For Joining 45 degree cornice mouldnings. Its such a small part of a job to have such a contraption. Just for he two top ends of a cabinet cornice moulding . I think the other side of the mitre jack is why they were found in workshops and the 45 degree side was just a side benefit in some instances. If you get a chance to pick up an old mitre jack check the 90 degree side and see how much use its had. I did this and found a well used marked side that was I think used the same as the chair makers vise that has been shown to also be used the same way. Probably even better way. But they both do the same thing. Accurate cutting and planing of end grain shoulder of tenons. Now that in a cabinet shop that also makes chairs and fine cabinets using M&T would be well used and also be there for the trimming of mitres when needed. Why its known as a mitre jack and not a tenon jack ? No idea there.

Two neat perfect shoulders using a Mitre jack explains what is seen in lovely 18 c chair making and smaller cabinets.
No chipping out as the shoulder plane leaves the work. Ive never cut a tenon so fast and accurate by hand and that was with my first attempt with the Mitre jack in these pictures.

IMG_2299.JPG IMG_2300.JPG IMG_2292.JPG IMG_2294.jpg

See the used working surface on my Australian made Blackwood Mitre jack below where the colour is missing. I didn't do that. The original owner did .
IMG_2297a.jpg

The French were producing these.
Plates for carpenters. Triangles for cabinetmakers. Squares for Cabinetmakers..png





These below came to my attention in a Popular wood working article. I would guess its a European tool as Ive never seen anything like this coming from an English workshop.

01pwm0214shoulders.jpg 1402_shldrs_jack.jpg

Perfect Shoulders | Popular Woodworking

Like the Tunbridge ware comment Mobyturns makes though.
"My point, there is a heck of a lot we don't know about the traditional makers, and their processes, purely because much of it was protected and only passed from master to apprentice as is highly evident with the making of Tunbridge ware. "

Who knows if the English used exactly the same? So much was and is still hidden and kept a big secret.
Good on them too for doing that.




And these as well.
What a chair maker's vise can do where other vises can't - YouTube

Forgotten Woodworking Tool (The Chair Maker's Vise) - YouTube


Untitledqaz.jpg

A shooting board or bench hook type shooting board has its uses in basic larger tenons like for a kitchen or dining table but the fine quality end of that way is these Jacks and vises.

All the years of repairing 18th c chairs and cabinets always had me wondering about the big difference in quality tenons I was seeing in that stuff compared to general tables and larger doors. I knew it couldn't be just flipping a rail over on a shooting board or a bench hook to tackle both sides separately. They are to precise and perfect for that.


Rob

I have a miter jack like those you've shown. I got it from England back when shipping from England was cheap- $100 or something total. It's hard to justify making something when you can buy that cheaply.

it's the only one of the group I've used a lot.

After watching Mack Headley make a fine little table on a Colonial Williamsburg video, I'd guess that many of these fixtures weren't seen that much because little was cut short of the mark. Mack pretty much cut everything right at the mark and then made a comment about touching up the fit based on what was needed vs. attempting to cut so that no fitting would be needed.

Everything was laser tight.

Not intending to imply everyone worked like that, but that it was possible. I doubt there are too many secrets that were kept indefinitely. Peter Nicholson worked as a cabinet maker and pretty much spilled the beans, and if there were magic jigs in number, some would still remain.

How we work now will be different because the maker will not have a saw in their hand for bulk work and sawing joints is a fraction of what would've been done. Sawing isn't especially taxing when accuracy counts and probably wasn't something a journeyman would've ceded much to an apprentice for other than perhaps things the apprentice could do well enough -and they would quickly be far beyond what anyone can generally do with a saw now. Mack had the fortune of working in a museum where actually doing the work while on display was part of the job. His setup was spartan and the making was very quick and neat.

George told me at williamsburg, the cabinetmakers would hide glue paper to the faces of the miter jack so they could use it without threatening the accuracy or condition of the underlying jack. I'm guessing this wouldn't have been bleached super white copier paper.