Are you looking for a way to instantly increase the perceived value of your boxes and cabinets? This tutorial will show you how. (Hint: It's not as simple as polishing them)

Surprisingly, of all the tools that my students use, the marking gauge seems to be the one that causes the most issues to begin with. Why is this?

You now have a face side and a face edge that are perfectly flat and square to one another. Now comes the time to hog off some material and make the two faces parallel to one another. This requires a lot of elbow grease so get warming up!

After flattening, thicknessing, and jointing has been complete it's time to move onto the final stage of dimensioning material, endgrain. This stuff is hard as nails and required very sharp and well tuned tools. This is how to plane the stuff.

When planing boards, you may encounter whats knows as ‘reversing grain'. This causes tear out and is quite possibly one of the most frustrating things in woodworking. But there are a few easy ways to reduce or eliminate it from happening completely!

You now have a face side and a face edge that are perfectly flat and square to one another. Now comes the time to hog off some material and make the two faces parallel to one another. This requires a lot of elbow grease so get warming up!

After establising one initial face, we need to plane an edge square to it. This can be challenging depending on the length and thickness of the board but there are a few small tricks to help you along the way. It's also a very transferable skill.

Flattening and squaring timber by hand is no easy task, I warn you. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of visualisation to diagnose what work needs to be done.