Nightstand Project: Rough Milling the Legs

Rough milling is an extremely important step in the furniture making process. You’re taking a rough plank of wood and turning it into oversized pieces for your project. A piece of wood is usually drier on it’s outside layers than it is on it’s inside layers. So, when you mill a board, you expose fresh wood which is most likely wetter than the exposed edges of the rough plank were. The milled pieces of wood will need some time to re-acclimate to your shop environment, and they may move or twist a bit during that acclimation process. When you finish mill the parts, you can re-flatten them.

The milling process starts with a rough sawn board, as seen below. This 8/4 plank is approximately 9′ long and 8″ wide. Before you do anything with a plank of wood, you need to assess it’s strengths and weaknesses. Where are the defects in the board? Where is the sap wood? How is the grain running? Plan out your milling strategy to (1) avoid the defects and sapwood and (2) get the correct grain orientation. You can see in the picture below that there are a few areas of sapwood that I want to cut around.

The next step is to trim off the end to get a clear view of the end grain. Look at the far right side of this plank. Do you see how the end grain is running vertically? If I cut a leg from that side of the board, I’ll end up with quartersawn grain. This will result in two faces of the leg having straight grain and two faces having flat sawn grain. In the center of the board, the end grain is in an arched configuration. So, a leg cut from the center will have flat sawn grain. Finally, the left hand side has the end grain running diagonally. Diagonal end grain is what I’m looking for; it will result in a leg that is rift sawn. A rift sawn leg will have relatively straight grain patterns on all four sides.

Also, notice that there is a check running along the bottom side of the board. I’ll need to cut that away to avoid problems later.

So now that I know where the desirable grain patterns are in this plank for my nightstand legs and I know where the sapwood and defects are that I need to avoid, it’s time to break it down into more manageable pieces. I use white chalk to mark cut lines, and then I make rough cross cuts on the chop saw, leaving the pieces several inches longer than their final length.

In the picture below, you can see that I have made several crosscuts. Also, my chalk lines are visible; these are indicating where the legs are in the larger pieces of wood, allowing for grain orientation and defects. Don’t worry too much about the waste. All of the offcuts will be used for other components on the nightstands. Even the sapwood can be useful for interior parts that will not be seen.

Notice the cup in face of the board sitting on the table saw. I’ll need to flatten that out later in the process.

Since I don’t have a flat edge on any of these boards yet, it is not safe to rip them into smaller chunks on the tablesaw. Instead, I freehand the cuts on the bandsaw, tracking to my chalk lines as best I can. I’m not overly concerned with getting a perfect cut here since I’ll be straightening out the edges later.

Now that I have some chunks of wood that are a manageable size, it’s time to use the jointer. Joint a face first. If you have a cup in the board (like I do in this case) put the concave side down. The concave side will be more stable on the jointer bed. It might amuse you to know that I had to look up the words concave and convex in the dictionary while I was writing this. I always get those two confused!

When you are face jointing like this, the jointer bed is your reference surface. Don’t worry about running the board against the fence; you don’t have a flat edge so it’s not going to do you any good.

Once you have a flat face, joint an adjacent edge. In this scenario, the jointer fence is your reference surface. It’s very important that you keep the face of the board tight against the fence so the jointer knives can mill a square edge. That is the end goal of using the jointer: a flat face and a flat edge that are perfectly square to one another.

Now, in my case here, I was dealing with a pretty darned flat edge that I had cut on the bandsaw. It took two passes on the jointer to get it perfectly square with the face. If you have an edge that is wildly out of flat, however, it may not be safe to edge joint that board. In that type of situation, you can use a straight-edge and a circular saw or router, or a sled that runs in the miter slot of your table saw to get an initial clean edge on the board prior to running it through the jointer.

Now it is safe to use the table saw. Putting the flat face down against the tabletop and the flat edge against the fence, I rip the the legs to rough width.

The final step is to run the leg blanks through the planer. The goal of this step is to mill a flat face perfectly parallel to my jointed face, and a flat edge perfectly parallel to my jointed edge. Since I am only rough milling at this point, I am not bringing the leg blanks to final thickness. I just want to square them up.

Notice that I ended up with a bit of burning on the edge of this leg blank from the table saw. Cherry can do that sometimes; one pass through the planer will clean it up.

And here you have eight rough milled leg blanks. These blanks are all approximately 2″ square, give or take an 1/8″. They also range from 26″ - 28″ long, depending on where I cut them from the large plank. The finished legs will have a final dimension of 1 3/4″ x 1 3/4″ x 25 3/4″. I was able to get four rift sawn leg blanks from the plank I showed in the first picture; I got the second set of four from another 8/4 board that I forgot to take a picture of.

Don’t forget that rough milled parts should be stickered so air can flow all around them. They need to re-acclimate to the shop environment before being milled to their final size.

Here’s a (blurry) picture of the end of one of the leg blanks. You can see how the end grain runs diagonally, giving me a relatively straight grain pattern on all four sides of the leg.

And here’s a picture of me… all smiles because I got some shop time. The little one is my youngest daughter; she came downstairs to see what all that noise was.