Planing Board

If your workbench surface is imperfect and not quite flat, a planing board can be the solution. The planing board plugs in to the workbench top via dowels and provides a flat surface to hand plane smaller, thinner boards. The premise of the planing board is to therefore create a secondary surface above the workbench surface to facilitate planing of small to medium components.

Along with a hardwood planing stop to butt boards against, a plug-in accessory will keep the boards from rotating and moving around while handplaning. This accessory is also plug-in and removable when no longer necessary. The planing board is extremely versatile with the selection of plug-in accessories and stops which can be added. Each accessory serves a purpose. In an earlier blog post, the Birds Mouth accessory was featured. The planing board itself attaches to the workbench surface through the use of dowels. Dowel placement is custom to your own workbench. In my case, I have two identically configured workbenches so I made the planing board portable between them. Hardwoods are used for the planing stop, plug-in accessories and wedges.

The images below demonstrate how the plug-in accessory keeps the board being planed locked against the planing stop. The board can then be handplaned without having it shift around. The planing board itself is created from dimensionally stable 3/4 in. Baltic Birch plywood. The dowels are both glued and reinforced with short wedges inserted into a kerf sawn into the top of each dowel.