Shooting Boards

A shooting board is a classic woodworking jig used to make perfectly square or precise angled cuts with a hand plane. A shooting board helps::

• Trim end grain precisely, leaving glass-smooth cuts on end grain.
• Ensures boards have dead-square ends.
• Lets you plane edges to precise angles, usually 90°, or other angles with an angled attachment.

Shooting boards are super accurate, great for joinery, and work especially well for small pieces. Shooting boards have a flat surface to rest the workpiece, a fence that is set to 90° and a track where your hand plane lies on its side and slides smoothly. You place the workpiece against the fence, and then run the plane along the track, and the jig keeps everything straight and stable.

I have three different shooting boards that I use. These shooting boards are all similar and just vary by size:

• My small shooting board allows me to trim small parts up to about 8″ in width. This shooting board is 14″ wide and 15″ long. It clamps into my front-vice on my workbench when I’m using it, and hangs conveniently nearby on a french cleat when I’m not using it.
• I use my medium-size shooting board for trimming edges on panels up to about 24″ wide. This shooting board is 25″ wide and 31″ long and clamps into the front-vice on my workbench.
• I use my long shooting board almost exclusively for trimming the edges of hand-cut veneer prior to edge-glueing veneers together. It can handle pieces of veneer up to about 55″ long. It has to be clamped to the top of my workbench when I’m using it.