Need advice on a hand sawing task

[Edward Mitton]

I am immersed in a shop project which involves hanging wall cabinets on a French cleat system. I am fairly good at most hand sawing tasks, but my attempts at cutting a board at a 45 degree edge along a 4 foot length turned rather dismal. I found it very difficult to maintain the correct angle for very long distances into the cut. I tried several workholding schemes such as standing the board on end while clamped in the vise, or trying to free-hand the board lying flat on the saw bench. Bleh....!
At the point where I had to stop and re-think this whole thing, I was sorely tempted to wheel out and dust off the TS or find and grab the circular saw.
I came to my senses before it was too late and began to think along the lines of "How would a 19th century cabinet maker have solved this problem?" (Insert sound of chirping crickets here).

Then it hit me! Why, of course, they would have fired up the PC and asked the folks on SMC!

[Chris Griggs]

Mark it. Saw close to the line or even just saw at 90 degrees and use a plane to get the bevel angle...much easier to plane to a precise line for something like that.

For something like that I typically just saw at about 90, then hog off most the waste to form the bevel with a coarse jack/fore/scrub, and then use a finely set plane of appropriate length to bring everything down to the final marks

[Edward Mitton]

Thanks, Chris,
I knew it had to be something simple like that! Using a plane did not even cross my mind.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I've found sawing 45's like that (along the length like cleats vs. across the grain like picture frames) much easier with the board held vertical in the end vise of my bench over sawing on a saw bench. Don't start with too much showing - unless your bench is super tall, I imagine the 4 feet means you've got a little too much flopping around, at least for how I would start that cut.

Like most sawing, getting started right and then staying out of the way of the saw is half the battle.

Unless the bevels are very wide or the wood very hard to work, I find french cleats easiest to make by beveling the edges with hand planes. Since you're working such a small area, you can take a real thick shaving with your jack plane and get pretty close pretty darn quick, and these don't need to be pretty. Drawknives also work very well for roughing out bevels, but can be a bit harder workholding-wise and require a little more finesse on the part of the user. (although there are guides to help with it)

The difficult part with roughing out bevels like these with handplanes if you're starting from a square corner is getting started on the small edge - balancing the angle you want on one point is tough, and you often end up with a rounded bevel that is hard to bring back into flat (and twist-free) along it's length.

Once you have enough to ride on, it's fairly easy to continue until the bevel is done. If you clamp the boards to your bench with holdfasts, the edge of the top board set in from the edge of the bottom board by the thickness, you have two points for a handplane to ride on, (three if you run the corner of the sole on the bench) making this much easier to start. You might be able to finish with a wide plane (think a number 8) this way, but just getting enough of an accurate bevel started makes the job much easier if you then move the board to the vises. (A leg vise and a deadman or a peg in the leg makes holding these a snap) A sharp blade means you can take some pretty big bites on these narrow cuts, at least to start. Stacking the pieces like this also means the angles will mate even if not 45. If none of that description made sense, there's a drawing in the tips section of the newest popular woodworking. I use this method when I make french cleats a lot, because I find it's actually faster than ripping the 45, if I'm starting with pieces of squared lumber I already have kicking around. Certainly, if I was to use something that I needed to rip to make both parts of the cleat, ripping at an angle and then cleaning up is faster.

As long as the angles aren't too extreme, the important part with french cleats is that the angle is roughly complementary, rather than perfectly 45 degrees.

[Tony Shea]

I never use a saw in this situation. I will only plane to desire angle. 45* angles are probably the easiest as the body does a pretty good job of figuring out where this angle is. You're not going to hit you're mark right on the money though so you need to spend some time marking out. mark out the end grain with the 45* marks (which actually is a great visual of where to hold your planes' sole) and the run a marking gauge or combo square set at the right distance and mark the face of the board. All you need to do now is plane down until you hit the corner of the board and mark on the face and you'll have your cleat. For most of the work you will want to have a heavily cambered iron as you are able to move the bevel around much easier than if you had an iron sharpened straight across. It's the same idea as creating a square edge, it is much easier to get an out of square edge back to square again with a cambered iron. Then if you don't want a slight cup in your bevel, switch over to a plane with a flatter bevel to finish up. But for a cleat system this really isn't all that necessary.

BTW, planing both edges at the same time will get you your complementary angles. If you stack your boards one on top of the other and offset them the correct distance to end up with a 45* when your finished, then you will have perfectly matching boards. You are essentially creating a rabbet with two sharp corners for your plane to ride on. Same idea as creating a rabbet and bevel to use hollows and rounds. Your plane will be held at the proper angle and will not be tippy.

[Edward Mitton]

I need to clarify a couple of things in the original post. I was neither clamped in the vise nor was I lying flat on the saw bench. It was the board in both instances!:rolleyes:

[Edward Mitton]

Thanks for all the tips....!

[Chris Vandiver]

Plane both cleats as one. Any angle close to 45deg. will work that way.

[Federico Mena Quintero]

I did this the other day like Chris Griggs says - mark the board (a 45-degree line on the end grain, and a marking gauge out of the ends of that on both faces of the board), clamp it vertically on the vise, and then saw carefully. If you can rip a board vertically like that, sawing at 45 degrees isn't too bad. Saw from both faces of the board, switching from one to the other periodically, to cancel out errors.

Then I cleaned up the saw cut with planes.

[Tom Garry]

I recently had to put some very precise 45 degree bevels on a piece and found great success by cross-cutting a piece of scrap to a 45 degree angle and setting it on my bench close to the piece I had to plane to the precise angle. By resting my plane on the scrap piece, by body "learned" what that angle felt like. I simply held the plane in that position and moved a couple of inches over to the work piece and took a shaving. After a few passes I repeated this "learning" process. By the time I completed the bevel it was spot-on 45 degrees. Amazing what the human body is capable of.

[Jim Koepke]

As others have said, the angle doesn't have to be 45º, if the two halves are complementary.

Making a cut with a hand saw at a consistent angle is the hard part.

Others have already said what would be my easy way to do this.

Put two pieces side by side in the vise an go at it with your widest plane at an angle.

The angle could even be a lot less. Just as long as it is enough to keep what ever is hanging on it from bouncing off with big trucks passing by or earthquakes rolling through.

jtk