Don Stephan
Posts: 825
Joined: 2003-07-18
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
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I agree with Jeff that the Festool with its track gives excellent results. And I'm a bit puzzled with a veneer "shooting board." My understanding of shooting boards for solid lumber is that the plane follows a perfectly straight edge (a reference edge) milled into the shooting board, the piece is incrementally eased over that perfectly straight edge and thin shavings removed until the edge of the board matches the reference edge of the shooting board.
For me, jointing the edges of a stack of veneer leaves is different from a true shooting board. The top and bottom "trap boards" in which the stack of veneer is clamped is used only to hold the leaves tight against one another, with no more than 1/8" exposed, not to provide a reference straight edge. I count on the #8 plane itself to provide the reference straight edge, just as one does when shooting the edge of a board too long for a shooting board. I have a #62, but expect the longer #8 will produce a straighter jointed edge because of its longer length.
Last week I had to prepare 53" leaves of 7" wide rift white oak veneer for taping into sheets 6 leaves wide. Trimming with the Festool and track was challenging as my track is only 52" long and there was not a couple hundred dollars in the budget for a longer track. Working carefully and pulling the saw back along the track produced very straight edges with minimal tearout of the difficult grain. Seven or eight light cuts with a #8 yielded perfect edges. During taping I found one seam with a slight bit missing - wouldn't have noticed but for the blue tape on the glue side. I cut a tiny sliver of matching grain and used the repair technique shown by Paul Schurch on one of his videos. I wasn't troubled because wood is a natural product, repairs are sometimes needed when working with solid wood, and raw veneer is solid wood.
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