In the Shop

Points on Shooting Board...

Esteemed Galoots of the Porch,

There are a couple of points I should like to offer to this discussion of shooting boards. 

Firstly, I have made several shooting boards over the past several years, including both the flat and the ramped variety. I still have a few tucked away, but tend to use just one, which is of the ramped persuasion.

Is the ramped version worth the extra effort? It is hard to say. I think that the differences are likely more psychological than real since the induced skew cutting angle involved is insignificant. Still, my gut feeling is that the skew cut is less jarring.

Here are two pictures of my ramped shooting board. It is a combination of scrap Jarrah and Pine. The top picture was taken shortly after it was built, while the lower picture focuses on the fence that has replaced the original.

This fence has (micro-) adjustability, about a 1/4" in all. It is just to make sure all is square. Over the past year I have only had to re-tune it once, and even then the alteration was very minor. I do not like using shims as David Charlesworth recommends, since the settings are fragile.

The shooting board will also trim miters through the attachment of an add-on miter fence. I have seen a number of shooting boards that have a superficial similarity to this set up. The difference is that while others are usually attached through dowels or bolts from the top of the miter fence and downwards into the shooting board base, mine is attached via a bolt into the existing perpendicular fence. The advantage of the latter set up is that it offers adjustability (by adjusting the main fence).

Regards from Perth,
Derek Cohen

January, 2006