Cut clean up...

Not clear what you are doing.
Is it an end cut you are talking about?
Then “use a thicker board to fill the depth of the cut ” makes no sense to me.

The use of a chisel on pine will require a very sharp edge to prevent tearing and splitting. A hard wood backing board might help this.

A guide block clamped right to the edge of an end cut is helpful if that’s what you are trying to do.

-- Michael :-{| Diapers and politicians both need to be changed often; and for the same reason.

Is it somewhere on the board you could use a plane instead of a chisel?

for long rips I cut a bit wider than desired then run the stock through a surface planer on edge…

-- .. heyoka ..

Get yourself the 20 dollar block plane from lowes or Home Depot. That will go easier cleaning than a chisel would. Or make sure your chisel is nice and flat and go very very slowly flat to the board

-- Just trying to build something beautiful

Jeff, I don’t understand if you made a rip cut (with the grain, down the length of the board) or a crosscut (against the grain, across the width of the board), so I will help with each.

If you rip a board, you clean up the edge with a jointer plane. If you crosscut the board, the easiest and most accurate way to clean it up is on a shooting board. I would not reach for a chisel to clean up saw cuts. A block plane will further aggravate you if you are cleaning up a rip cut.

Lastly, crosscutting with a rip saw is going to continually frustrate you if that is how you made the cut. There are a ton of old crosscut hand saws out there that you can get for pennies on the dollar. See if you can find one to get rid of the stress a rip saw will give you.

-- Mike

Great point paratrooper. Didn’t think about it like that. Please amend my comments and listen to paratrooper, he is a hand tool guy

-- Just trying to build something beautiful

Okay guys, thanks for all your input. I was a little freaked out so it seems I wasn’t very clear.

1) I was talking about the little notch out in the upper left hand corner.

2) I’m a new hand tool guy and learning from Shannon Rogers Hand Tool School My intention is to force myself to use a chisel to learn the basics before doing it the easy way (Block Plane) Actually I haven’t even purchased a block plane yet (yea that new)

I solved the problem by learning through trial and error and got it down now. The short cut was done with a tenon saw so that was clean. I was mostly referring to the rip cut of the small cut out as you can imagine what that looked like with probably a dull saw. I realised I wasn’t using anything for a reference point i.e.. the back of the chisel. (duh) I was just free handing it at a 45 degree angle.

Any way thanks for the comments and I hope my noobness entertains you.

Jeff

I see he does recommend learning to saw cleanly enough that you don’t need much more than a chisel to clean up your cut. But if you’re not there yet and your saw isn’t sharp and true, don’t feel like you have to torture yourself doing it the hard way. A plane is basically just a chisel held at a consistent depth and angle after all. It’s still a hand tool and Shannon uses a plane to clean up his saw cuts sometimes too. It was in his sawing fundamentals video.

But at least you can laugh at yourself and are having fun learning. That’s the important part.

Thanks Tim,
I know, but I kind of get off on torturing myself ;) Really I think it helps me remember my mistakes better and half the time I learn other things along the way of the “scenic route” Some times I just take it a little to far…lol

Oh and I thought I owed you all an updated pic…!

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ljimg/mjn4gnq.jpg!

These were the joints I was trying to clean up.

P.S.- By the way it seems all my images are inserted as links. I’ve seen others with the picture right in the message. What am I doing wrong?

Jeff, first on pictures. When you are making your post or reply, above the text box there is an “img” button. Click on that and it allows you to insert pictures directly.

On your project. Is it a saw bench of some type? I now understand better what you were doing and asking. I still say I would not clean up that cut with a chisel. My chisels skills are not good enough to clean that up correctly.

The two tools I would use are either a chisel plane or a router plane. A chisel plane is a better option than a chisel because the plane body will will provide more stability to pare the edge. I actually would use the router plane over the chisel plane because of the accuracy that it will give.

-- Mike

You guessed it trooper!! Funny, must be my browser, that is exactly how I’m doing the image uploads.

Now you got me curious. How would you go about using a router plane. Doesn’t it need something to ride on? For example when using a router plane on a dado it sits on the surface of the board while digging deeper. I can see how you could clean up where the rip meets the cross cut but not how to clean up the full length of the rip cut.

To clean up that cut there are 2 ways I know.

1) Block plane. Cut the wood by skewing it. End it with a chisel plane…... // if you have this item
2) Block plane again. At the end use a chisel. A wide chisel. The back needs to be FLAT.

John

Jeff, clamp boards to the side to give the router plane a place to ride on. Then it will clean a straight and uniform depth all the way into the corner.

-- Mike

I see what happened with your picture upload. When you upload a picture, it adds exclamation marks to the beginning and end of the link. Somehow you’ve got an extra exclamation mark before each of your image links that was supposed to go with your image. Maybe you hit return just after one of them and split them up. Be careful to be on a new line and go to the very end of that line after you upload the picture. You can still edit your original question to fix the link if you want to, just not later replies.

Missed an exclamation at the beginning…

-- Don't anthropomorphize your handplanes. They hate it when you do that. -- OldTools Archive