Turn Rough Lumber into Beautiful Boards

Rethink how you joint and plane to create more attractive furniture

All beautiful furniture begins with great design, but that’s not enough. You also need spectacular materials. For the kind of furniture I make, that means digging through stacks of rough lumber, and seeing the beauty hidden beneath the shaggy surface. Last week, I wrote about how I pick lumber, the first step (not counting design) of nine along the way to a completed piece of furniture. The second step is taking that rough lumber and milling it to create boards that can be used to make furniture.

At a minimum, that transformation requires you to straighten, flatten, plane to thickness, and square the lumber, but it makes more sense to also include ripping it to width and crosscutting it to length. You turn rough lumber into a board (or, more accurately, a blank for a specific part) that’s ready for joinery. However, milling is not an isolated process. It’s part of a larger undertaking: making a piece of furniture. So, when you are milling rough lumber, you must not lose sight of the ultimate goal: beautiful furniture.

Within the context of making a piece of furniture, there’s more to milling than turning rough lumber into flat, straight, and square boards. As I see it, the true purpose of milling is to transforming the lumber you bought at that lumber yard into the boards you actually want for the piece of furniture, and that often involves more than simply jointing, planing, ripping, and crosscutting.

Far more often than not, woodworkers accept the faces and edges a piece of lumber has when it leaves the sawmill, and work from there. It’s as if the sawyer began the milling process for us, and we just work within the boundaries they provided, so we just need to flatten a face, joint an edge square to it, and then plane the board to thickness. That’s fine some of the time, but it’s better think of rough lumber as a raw material, like a big block of clay, that you can mold and rearrange to create the board that you really want, because, honestly, it’s very difficult to find perfect boards readymade from the sawyer, unless you are there explaining to the sawyer precisely what you want as the lumber is cut from the tree.

That’s what I am writing about today (how to manipulate rough lumber to create the beautiful boards you are after), but as I do, I’ll also address the fundamentals of milling lumber.