I'm recovering from a hernia op, which has me somewhat limited to what I can do in the shop, and to prevent further injury, DR (also a WW) has approved "plane tuning" as an activity. On my list of skills to acquire is a shooting board. I understand the basic concept: Make the end of a piece "square". But as usual, I over think things before I do them.

  1. The making square part seems to be a no brainer, assuming your fence is square, blade is sharp, and plane body is square, etc. If it's not coming out square, there are well-documented solutions and videos
  2. The dimension part is what trips me up. So let's say I have 4 pieces of cherry, all 12" long, 3" wide, 3/4" thick that came off the table saw. I now want to square up the ends because let's say my x-cut sled isn't square (or what ever reason my milling process isn't producing square ends). So to the shooting board they go, but now, after shaving down the ends of these 4 pieces, which is removing material, I now have 4 pieces that are 12-x long, where for each piece, x is a different # depending on how many passes it took to square it


Do you see my dilemma? So what's the trick? Mill them all to 12 1/8" inches and sneak up on a perfect 12 on the shooting board? Shoot each piece and dry fit "till it fits"?