 know what some of you are thinking. Did that old coot just appear from the grave? No, just a little editing magic. Today's video we're going to talk about what is a shooting board and why do you want one and how do you make one. Oh, I would work here's Paul Carlson here, small workshop guy. Here's one of my shooting boards. I call this one the David Wright of the Wood by Wright Design. I have a second one which I call my Rob Cosman Design. I'm going to walk you through how you make each of these. You can pick whichever one you think you want to make and then that'll kind of be the end of the video because this is a real simple make. I don't have to actually show you but if you then want to watch me make the David Wright version then I do have some fast forward clips of that. If you bail out early because you've already got a shooting board do me a favor please go ahead and give me a like a comment and a subscribe and if you want to throw a couple dollars a month my way through Patreon that would be much appreciated. First let's talk about why do you want a shooting board. Well the shooting board is where you can use a bench plane or a special shooting plane if you have bought one and you can take a piece of wood where you cut approximately up to your line but now you're not sure that it's exactly 90 degrees to your board. So what you can do is take this jig called a shooting board. What does that look like? Well on the bottom side of it there's a cleat and that's just a piece of wood doesn't even have to be perfectly straight but try to get it on there 90 degrees. That way you can push it up against the edge of your work bench or work table or whatever and then you have a rail to run your bench plane across or along and then a perfectly 90 degree backer board. Then you take a piece of wood and you press it up against that plane pull it back slide that wood over a little bit and then shoot it. You can kind of hear it as it slices across there and you can see a little stuff come off and so then when you've done that process a few times you should feel comfortable that you've got 90 degrees here and 90 degrees here if you set it upright. So that's what it's for. Take all of your rough cuts and turn them into very precise 90. Let me just walk you through verbally the build of what I call the Rob Cosman model. So you take the three-quarter inch MDF and size-wise mine is about 12 inches wide and 20 inches long and make sure you've got some nice straight edges on there although that's actually not critical. Then take yourself some particle board as well and you're gonna laminate that particle board to the top of the MDF and that's quarter inch particle board because that way this edge of the plane will run along that without cutting it. So it's down here in the non-cutting area. If your plane is different then adjust accordingly. Now Rob feels that when you laminate these two together with all that moisture while you're clamped up and waiting for it to dry it's liable to cup up. You know the ends are liable to cup up leaving a little valley in the middle. To compensate for that put on the very bottom like eight strips of blue tape in the middle and then maybe five strips here about three inches away and then three strips further down here and then five and three. So what you're doing is building a little bridge. Then when you glue these together and all that moisture and everything and you use your clamps to clamp them down you're kind of making it go the other way. You're making it go with a hump in the middle and then as the edges try to come up it sort of ends up being flat. Well but anyway I use this method because I think he knows what he's talking about. So I got a perfectly straight board and put a straight edge on there I can't get a feeler gauge anywhere underneath it so I certainly avoided any cupping. Then I take a piece of hardwood. Don't put the hardwood all the way up here on the end. Put it a couple inches in so that you've got room for your plane to go through here. If you add it right on the end then your plane might tend to go around and you'd be rounding things off. You want to be nice and square. You're probably not going to push it any further than that so it's still supported all the way up here. Alright well that's that build. Can't be much simpler than that. Make sure this is a high enough in order to support whatever you might be cutting all the way up. Very very simple build. Very inexpensive materials. The David Wright build now is different. I just have a piece of oak. Really nice piece of oak. In this case I think I've got one that's about nine inches. You know they tend to come from the hardwood store just a little narrower. It's hard to get twelve, fifteen inch pieces. So nine inches wide and I think this one's a little shorter and it doesn't much matter. 16 inches long. Got that all dimensioned with 90 degree angles. Not that critical actually because you're going to run it across your table saw with a dado stack. In other words I get that all rectangular and then I leave about three quarters of an inch, half of an inch, three quarters of an inch here and draw a line and then measure the widest part of my bench plane and then have another line that far apart from the first line. Then with those two guidelines just go over to my table saw put on a dado stack and raise the dado blade just you know just under a quarter of an inch. In other words just check it against this and make sure your blade's not raised higher than this non-cutting area. Then you push this over the dado stack, sneak up on the cut. You want it to be kind of nice and tight. You don't want a lot of slop for your plane here. You want that plane to be kind of right in that groove and use that for a guideline. You're going to push it up against this edge anyway. So you can have a little bit of slop and it wouldn't be critical because you're just going to push against this edge. Alright so that's how you fix that board. Then you simply put a hardwood backer brace on it at 90 degrees to this edge right here and the only other thing you do is put a cleat on the bottom side. In my case I used my shaper origin since I have invested in one to engrave a logo so it just looks fancier when my kids inherit it not too far down the line. Both David Wright and Paul Sellers have videos out about how to tune up your shooting board if it does get out of alignment through swelling or wood movement. So look for those if you need them. Well that's how you build these so you can stay around and see a build of this David Wright one if you'd like to. I've got it all fast forward to keep it a little bit exciting for you. Small workshop guide, hang on for the build video if you'd like. Otherwise stay safe in your workshop and have a nice week.