OK, in my previous post on Shooting board, I said I was putting runners for the hand plane to ride against. That worked well.
My issue came when my plans called for me to lower the fence on the shooting board. The reason for this idea was to combine the notion of a bench hook with a shooting board. In using the new shooting board, I discovered the error of my ways. In lowering the fence, you have no support for the shooting of the board and so you get tear out and splitting on the edge.
A bench hook needs a low fence so that you can plane the top of a board and have the fence below the board.
A shooting board needs a high fence so that it has support for any required board to be run up against the fence and have complete support for it’s thickness.
I’m going to have to replace the fence next time I’m in the shop and make a dedicated bench hook for that purpose and use a dedicated shooting board for that purpose.
Lesson learned!
